This week’s Industry Person of the Week is Malay Vyas, Vice President of Business Development at Indar.
Q: How did you get started working in your field?
Malay: I graduated as a Mechanical Engineer from a small town in India and wanted a job that would also fulfill my wanderlust. So I ended up joining a pump company as a field service engineer. Not only did this take me to remote places in India but also in every kind of process plants from Beer Distilleries to Power Plants to Refineries. I suddenly found an added passion, rotating machinery and how they really were the heart of a plant.
Q: What do you love the most about your job? What are you most proud of?
Malay: Pretty odd to say but I love reading specifications and instruction manuals. My first assignment as a Field Service Engineer was to troubleshoot a 10 stage ring section boiler feed pump while my service manager was busy in another emergency. The pump had to be dismantled and I spent the whole night reading the IOM Manual and Drawings trying to understand what could go wrong. From hereon, there was no stopping – find me a spec, and I will read it. This got to such a crazy level that when I got married, I asked my colleagues to gift me Igor Karrasik’s Pump Handbook as a wedding gift. My wife still hates me for that!
I am proud of being a part of some of the best teams in business across various companies from Singapore to Indonesia to Kentucky and Texas. I have learned from colleagues, subordinates, and superiors. I am proud of being given the opportunities to lead, scale up, and grow some of the biggest names in the Industry.
Q: What advice would you give to someone considering this line of work or new to the field?
Malay: Be courteous, work hard and be curious. Some twenty years ago, one of my managers told me “if you say you know everything, in the field of Rotating Machinery, you will always be wrong”. This applies even today, be prepared to learn something new, shed your ego – learning is a never-ending process. If you are given a chance to lead, take it as a privilege and an opportunity to positively impact those on your team.
Q: Can you talk about a project you recently worked on?
Malay: I had just joined Ingeteam Indar Machines and my first visit was to visit a Desalination Plant in California where Indar had some critical application pumps installed. We were completing one year of operation of these machines and my colleagues from the Engineering division in Spain were visiting the plant to check the machines as a courtesy to the End User. This was my second day in the company, and I was a little apprehensive about what to expect. At the site, we pulled out a 20’ tall submersible axial flow, fish-friendly pump with marine life all over it. Being in the Energy market almost all of my career, this was a sight to behold as the crane lifted one of the three pumps out of the lagoon and seawater dripped down, the super duplex stainless pump was covered in marine life!. The other two pumps hummed along – I then realized the positive environmental impact of submersible pumps – absolutely no noise emanating from two 800 HP machines working about 10’ below us. In the last twenty years, I worked a lot on Vertical Line Shaft pumps, now I was being introduced to a new-age Submersible machine. That got me and my colleagues an idea to work on a white paper to see where a Submersible could be more cost-effective than a LineShaft pump – in talking to End Users, we realized that beyond a certain depth and above a certain power ratings, a submersible can help save over 45% in Operation and Maintenance costs. A submersible can also help a water authority upgrade/increase capacity throughput through a pump house without modifying the layout. This solution helps as cities grow larger and stormwater becomes a major issue. Since I live in Houston, I am aware of our inadequacies – our lineshaft stormwater pumps stop working since pump houses get flooded – here’s where submersibles are an ideal solution. This change can bring a significant amount of reliability and savings to our community. We are already in discussions with some clients who want to put submersibles instead of lineshaft pumps for stormwater mitigation
Q: Anything Else you would like to add?
Malay: Yes, I do stand-up comedy as a hobby – it has helped me deliver interesting Lunch and Learns on some remotely boring topics like understanding Pump Vibration or Deciphering Cavitation. Humor helps! Every time I feel overconfident about something, I go to an open mic in Downtown Houston – it levels things up.
Connect with Malay on LinkedIn.
THANK YOU, MALAY! WE LOOK FORWARD TO KEEPING UP WITH YOU THROUGH THE #PUMPTALK COMMUNITY!
KNOW AN AMAZING PERSON WHO IS MAKING VALUABLE CONTRIBUTIONS WITHIN INDUSTRY? NOMINATE THEM TO BE AN “INDUSTRY PERSON OF THE WEEK”!
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