Inside Milrem Robotics with Aleksei Filippov: how are projects handled?

Today is my turn to shed some light on Milrem Robotics’ Project Management Department (PMD) activities. The PMD team is located in three countries. The main team is situated in Estonia (Tallinn, Tartu, Pärnu and Järva-Jaani), but we also have colleagues in Sweden and the Netherlands. With the recent COVID lockdown and work-from-home experience, it really does not matter anymore where you are located, we are just one click away to get in touch with each other or with our customers. Nevertheless, in the defence industry, you need to be close to your customers to support them, so we also spend some time travelling, but much less than our fellow colleagues in the Sales Department.

The project managers (PM) in the PMD team have very different backgrounds. Some of us previously worked in the defence industry, some of us have been a part of academia, some of us joined from different manufacturing industries, and some of our team members had a distinguished military careers in the defence forces in Estonia and the Netherlands. The variety of professional backgrounds makes us a very strong team capable of delivering a project of any complexity and size in any part of the world. 

So, what do we do in PMD? In a nutshell, the PMD team is responsible for keeping an eye on all internal developments and external projects. In order to understand what kind of projects we usually manage, we need to elaborate on our products and services.

Milrem Robotics is widely known as the leading manufacturer of defence unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). We have three main products in our portfolio:

THeMIS - a medium size UGV.

Type-X - a Robotic Combat Vehicle that is intended to support mechanized units.

MIFIK - Milrem Intelligent Function Integration Kit, that can give autonomous functions with a safety functionality to ground platforms.

In addition, we provide engineering design and integration services and concept development services for the utilization of unmanned vehicles.

Therefore, the projects we handle can be related either to one specific product or it could be a solution that includes a platform, integration of the customer’s specific payload and/or some degree of design and development activities or concept development consultations. We rarely have projects that concentrate on the delivery of a single product, but rather the development of sophisticated solutions that require cooperation between different departments, and industry partners.

Personally, I distinct our projects into the following categories:

1. Customer projects.
2. Collaboration initiatives.
3. Product developments.
4. Demos and Exhibitions.

Some of these projects are:

·        In September 2022 we delivered to Ukraine the first THeMIS in CASEVAC configuration. Based on the usage of this vehicle on a battlefield, the customer has provided us with a lot of valuable feedback. This feedback has been utilized to add additional features and improve our next batch of THeMIS’ that were delivered to Ukraine in 2022.

·        Throughout 2022 we have been assisting the Italian Army with concept development activities on how to utilize different unmanned ground and aerial vehicles in their operations. The scope of the cooperation is to capture, analyse and deliver decision support data from all stages of the experimentation process, stemming from field activities, wargaming, modelling and simulation, innovative technologies, etc., that will respond to the challenges set forth by the problem statement.

·        In June 2022 Milrem participated in France at the Eurosatory Defence Exhibition. This is by far the largest and the most important exhibition in Europe. For this exhibition, Milrem collaborated with different industry partners to integrate their payloads on the THeMIS and Type-X. These collaborations included months of negotiations, planning, design, and consequent integration activities. Each collaboration was a separate project and had a respective team led by PM and SEM. Also, making arrangements at the exhibition venue and building a pavilion was also a stand-alone project.

·        In June 2022, in Slovenia we had a live firing demo, which was a joint collaboration project to integrate Kongsberg's weapons station with Bushmaster 30 mm cannon on top of the Milrem’s Type-X platform.

Internal development projects are also an integral part of our daily life in the PMD and are required to further improve our products/platforms to offer customers new features and to keep the competitive edge.

At the same time, we also constantly work on the development of next-generation platforms and products.

All of the projects require thorough planning, internal alignment, coordination with partners, oversight of risks and budget as well as follow-up of production progress. Needless to say, hauling military equipment requires export/import licenses and sometimes could be a logistics nightmare. However, PM never works alone, and the success of the project is always a team effort.

Considering that most of the projects require some sort of engineering activities, the project manager usually works in close partnership with a system engineering manager (SEM). PM and SEM are usually the main drivers in the project, but there are always other competencies such as mechanical engineering or software development (just to name a few) involved in the project activities, depending on the complexity of the requested solution.

If you have been afraid to apply for a position in Milrem’s PMD or any other team, because what we do seems to be rocket science (actually it is only UGV science), I can assure you that Milrem has a very supportive culture. We invest in mentoring and educating new team members and we believe that success is a joint venture that comes through support and collaboration.