Challenges kept Shah evolving at Delphi, GM

Suresh Shah never really retired when he left Delphi Corp. in 2016 after a storied career in the automotive industry.

"It's like I have two lives," he said. "Put it this way: One is a professional life, and the other is service to the Society [of Plastics Engineers]."

Shah is one of 10 inductees to the 2021 Plastics Hall of Fame, presented by the Plastics Academy. Recognized for his 30-year-plus career and numerous patents, he recounted his life and career during a recent interview with Plastics News.

Shah holds 44 intellectual properties — 28 U.S. patents, 10 defensive publications and six trade secrets — with 40 percent of them in production. The national average is about 3 percent for patent holders.

In addition to his work developing and commercializing important automotive plastics innovations, Shah is well known in the industry for the numerous roles he has played for SPE, including as a board member and chairman of the automotive division. In 2017, he received the division's Lifetime Achievement Award.

"I thought I was done after the Lifetime Achievement Award," he joked.

"I'm honored and grateful to the Plastics Academy and the organizers who must have gone through the selection processes," he said.

Norm Kakarala, a colleague, said Shah earned a reputation as the "fastest problem-solver" in the plastics industry.

"He has proven himself to be one of the best and most prolific inventors," Kakarala said in a letter nominating Shah to the Hall of Fame.

Shah was born to an upper-middle-class family in India, his father the owner of a textile manufacturing business. As Shah began college, pursuing a degree in chemical engineering in Mumbai, his father told him once he's done with that to go ahead and get into textile chemistry.

He applied for the textile program at the University of Bombay, but when he was asked to put in a second option on the application, he didn't know what to put.

"He said, 'If you don't get into textile, what will you do?' I asked him what the best second field is and he said plastics," Shah said.

"And wouldn't you know, I didn't get into textile."

Shah didn't know much about plastics then, and even had to convince his father that textile and plastics engineering all came down to chemicals.

He worked for a small rotational molding company before coming to the U.S. in 1980 to begin studying for his master's degree in plastics engineering at the University of Massachusetts. He completed the degree and then went back to India because of the difficulty of finding a job without a green card.

"An adviser told me to relax and just do the Ph.D. I had never planned on it," he said. "But it all fell into place."

Shah came back to the States, to the metro Detroit area, and studied to earn a doctorate in polymer chemistry and plastics engineering in 1985.

That same year, he joined General Motors. With invitations to both its research and its development teams, Shah chose the latter.

"I like to develop; it's something I've liked since childhood," he said. "I was just not interested in basic research."

And he set to work bringing in plastics to replace costly and heavy metals in various vehicle components.

He was the first to invent and introduce a plastics module concept in 1993, which was the SuperPlug, an all-plastic inner door that replaced 50 metal pieces into a single-piece plastics module. This was lauded as an extremely complex part to be commercialized using gas injection molding technology.

Shah also applied artificial intelligence and Taguchi methods for optimization with in-cavity temperature/pressure sensors, additive manufacturing for prototyping and a fit-and-finish infrared camera. He also developed a nearly entirely plastic steering column.

"I was lucky to get a lot of opportunities to work on several projects," he said. "When you work on a different product line, which all have different requirements and different challenges, and I love challenges."

Shah thinks one of the important pillars to his success was the support of his wife, Bina; his daughter, Nidhi; and son, Ankur. He traveled a lot in the early '90s while Bina was home raising the children.

The team of engineers he worked around, support from management and his education really cemented his success.

"Not many people in the plastics industry have that kind of background so that really helped me to solve any problem or any challenges for inventions," he said.

He said networking was a big part of the growth of plastics in the automotive industry.

"You can reach out to another expert in a subject because sometimes you don't know certain things, plastics or not," he remarked. "Especially when electronics were going to be used with the plastic — you try to get an expert in each thing."

Joint development efforts with material suppliers helped Shah apply his modules and projects into reality. The "win-win" situation helped expedite projects.

While he advises newcomers to not take on too many projects at once, Shah enjoyed the variety of different projects he worked on and spending the time to leverage support from suppliers often improved the outcome.

"I used to over-promise it and then you get overwhelmed," he said. "I always had the desire to, but maybe when you come from another country you feel the need to prove yourself."

Even with the current industry issues — lightweighting, recycling and sustainability, EVs — Shah still finds time to muse about where the industry intends to go.

It's no secret more of the next generation isn't entering the plastics industry, creating a shortage for skilled workers. Shah wonders if this is because of the "bad name" plastics often gets because of recycling messages. That's one of the challenges Shah is helping to take on along with SPE, as a councilor.

"For the engineers, I think the advice I could give them are to have more listening skills and writing skills," he said. "It helps the communication with your team because a slight lack in communication now can make or break the whole project."

Across many industries, and even in his own family, Shah remarked on the millennials' affinity for job-hopping — a few years here, a few there. Most Hall of Fame members stuck with one company throughout their entire career, Shah said.

"Looking back, I was in a comfort zone. You keep getting promotions; I was at the highest technical level at a very young age — 45 — at Delphi," he said.

He was one of the two technical leads and remembered a time when a friend had started up a plastics business and had asked Shah to run it. Ultimately, Shah admits, he had to pass because of his career at Delphi.

"A mentor of mine told me to always ask the why, who, when, where and how, and I always asked that of every project," he said. "Because that way you can go into the depth of the project."

He urged young engineers to think outside of the box and to accept a different way of thinking.

"Think of each challenge as an opportunity — only then will the innovations come."