TAUBER INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL OPERATIONS
STONERIDGE, INC. Product Line Strategy – Driveline Actuation Student Team: Oluwabunmi Fatodu – Master of Business Administration Sasanka Mouli Neti – Master of Science in Engineering, Industrial and Operations Engineering Project Sponsors: Rajaey Kased – Vice President, Sales and PL Management Scott Skelton – Product Line Manager Faculty Advisors: Raed Al Kontar – College of Engineering Ariel Shwayder – Ross School of Business Stoneridge Inc., founded in 1965, is an independent designer and manufacturer of highly engineered electrical and electronic components, modules, and systems, principally for automotive, commercial, motorcycle, agricultural, and off-highway vehicle markets. Stoneridge tasked the Tauber team to develop a go-to-market strategy for a key product within the Driveline Actuation group. Starting with a nearly blank slate, the team worked not just toward identifying the specific target opportunity within the 8-million-unit Total Available Market (TAM), but also toward building a strong value proposition and curating a forward-looking manufacturing strategy for the immediate opportunity. Stoneridge would supply this actuator through a Tier 1 to an OEM. In a multi-tiered value chain such as this, it is imperative to understand the various customer needs accurately. In order to incorporate the voice of the customer into a strong value offering, the team gathered market intelligence from various online resources, worked with an anthropology consulting firm to highlight the inefficiencies in similar products currently available on the market, and finally evaluated the feasibility of an integrated system offering. This integrated system would not just be a cost improvement, but also a weight savings and performance improvement over the incumbent product, owing to the synergies between the actuators.
TAUBER.UMICH.EDU
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STONERIDGE, INC.
The team identified a forward-looking manufacturing strategy, along with a detailed development timeline for the target customer after carefully evaluating the capital expenditure, floor space, and labor requirements for different manufacturing facilities that Stoneridge operates. Upon modeling the financial impact of different manufacturing scenarios, the team identified a few combinations that would be most profitable to Stoneridge once production begins. Thinking above and beyond just the immediate target opportunity, the team also identified other subsequent opportunities across different geographies and vehicle segments that Stoneridge could pursue once the immediate business opportunity has been captured. Overall, the team built a comprehensive playbook for Stoneridge to deliver on these opportunities, adding more than $76 million in revenue over the next 5 years.
