Even as a child, Kumi Premathilake was drawn to how and why things worked the way they did. “I always wanted to be on the technical side,” explains Premathilake “I watched my two older brothers take things apart, like my mom’s kitchen appliances, and I wanted to do the same fun things they did.”

While she received encouragement to satisfy her inquisitive mind, Premathilake attributes her love for math to her tenth-grade teacher. “She was very petite, and she had so much energy,” says Premathilake. “At the beginning of every class, she would put a problem on the chalkboard and ask us to solve it as fast as we could.” Premathilake credits the teacher’s drive and intelligence for inspiring her decision to become an engineer.

After graduating college with a chemical engineering degree, Premathilake took a position in research and development at Culligan International. There, Premathilake led teams to develop water purification and reclamation technologies. The job allowed her to satisfy her long-held fascination with water and energy. “I made a conscious decision to work in these verticals because they’re so critical and intertwined,” explains Premathilake.

“Producing energy requires water and producing clean water requires energy. Smart use of both of these resources is critical to long-term environmental and energy security, and human life itself.”

After nearly 16 years, Premathilake left Culligan to manage the product strategy and power solutions portfolio at Johnson Controls. At the time, Johnson Controls was a key player in the automotive industry. Lithium-ion batteries had recently come into play, and according to Premathilake, the company, wanted to move towards higher levels of electrification, while minimizing environmental impact. The company also started looking beyond the automotive industry, with an eye towards the power grid, bringing renewables online, uninterrupted power supply and power tools.

In 2015 Premathilake joined Aclara as the company’s vice president of product management and business development. The opportunity allowed Premathilake to work with both water and energy for the first time in her career. Her work with Aclara has coincided with what Premathilake, considers one of the best times to be in the energy industry. “The U.S. power grid is one of history’s greatest innovations,” says Premathilake, “That grid was invented at least 100 years ago, so we are kind of in what I consider ‘Grid 2.0’ – only today, the industry calls it smart grid”.

Premathilake acknowledges that with so many renewables coming online at once, combined with the emergence of bidirectional power flow, and the need for utilities to have more visibility into the grid so they can react to downed lines or outages quickly, the modern grid has not evolved without its share of complications. She also sees this complexity as an opportunity to redefine how the industry resolves such challenges.

To address the market’s most pressing issues, Premathilake and her team regularly speak with their utility customers. Concerns exist around things like aging infrastructure and assets or securing the grid from natural disasters and cyberattacks, but what Premathilake finds interesting is when she asks her utility customers what they would like to address, most utilities are really thinking about their long-term roadmap, and whether the solutions they have today will be scalable down the road, or can they innovate on those solutions in the future.

“We have found we need to think about how we can help position the utilities and how they help their customers. In the past, utilities didn’t have to compete with the power provider in the next town over or to worry about non-traditional energy sources,” says Premathilake. “Today, they have to take all of these into consideration. As the business model continues to change, it makes it even more critical for utilities to control the assets in the field.” Premathilake and her team also have found that the majority of Aclara’s customers prefer to work with providers who can integrate with other industry partners. “When we talk to our utility clients, they don’t want 20 different solutions. They want all their partners to work together, making sure their solution providers are integrated. That integration is really important.”

Currently, in addition to working on offerings in its product pipeline, Premathilake points out that at least 80 percent of the Aclara’s workforce has engineering titles because that’s where most of the company’s investments lie. “We’re a technology company first, and we continue to seed the pipeline with new ideas as we prepare to launch new products. We are especially excited about the work we are doing with a communications module that will go on any sort of distribution grid asset like a recloser or capacity bank that’s managing the power quality for the utility, so it’s going to have the utility get the information from those assets and also control the grid more effectively.”

While her engineering background has been a tremendous asset towards becoming a leader in water and energy, Premathilake credits one of her early managers for demonstrating the value of effective communication. According to Premathilake, her manager had broad business experience, which was helpful. “What made him great with customers is that he could take a customer issue and translate it from technical engineering-speak, which is so important to clear communication. He always sought his customers’ input, and I thought, ‘that’s the way I want to be.’”

It is a lesson that has served Premathilake well and one she has shared throughout her career. Her team at Aclara understands the importance of communicating to their customers about the things that are relevant to them and in a way that they will hear it. “The way we speak to a GM or division head is going to be different from how we speak with a network engineer or a customer service representative. They each have different concerns, so when our team talks with the different types of customers, we think about role-based interaction.”

Premathilake says that when she started her job at Aclara, the company conducted a customer survey. Reviewing the responses, someone commented that each partnership between a vendor and its customer is like a marriage.“We start by promising our customers a lasting solution. That means we’d better make sure it’s a good relationship and that the customer is happy.” Premathilake remains mindful of the comment, but there is another, more personal goal by which she measures her success as a customer partner and professional colleague. “Any time I begin a job or assume a new position, I tell myself I will leave the place in better shape than when I started.” Right now, Premathilake considers herself in the middle of her journey with Aclara, but asserts, “I am still on that journey here, but it has been very satisfying to look back on what we’ve accomplished so far.”