THE BOEING COMPANY – SUSTAINABLE MATERIAL Integrating Sustainability Strategy at Boeing Commercial Airplanes

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.

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. STONERIDGE, INC.

TARGET CORPORATION

Improving Problem Freight Disposition Time

Student Team: Jen Garb – Master of Business Administration Celia Osman – EGL (BSE & MSE in Industrial & Operations Engineering) Parsa Shoa – EGL (BSE in Computer Science & MSE in Industrial & Operations Engineering)

Project Sponsors: Nicolas Caretta – Sr. Director Product Management Heath Holtz – Sr. VP of Field Operations Arthur Valdez – EVP & Chief Supply Chain Logistics Officer

Faculty Advisors: Luis Garcia-Guzman – College of Engineering, University of Michigan Owen Wu – Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

Target Corporation is a U.S. based retailer that provides high-quality, on-trend merchandise at attractive prices, generating $93.6B in annual revenue through online and in-store sales. Target has a vast distribution center network, operating 46 distribution centers, to replenish both stores and Fulfillment Centers (FC), which deliver e-commerce orders straight to guests. Over 75% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Target store. Its Regional Distribution Center (RDC) network receives goods from more than 8,000 vendors and replenishes both Target stores and Target.com. Target maintains both small-format discount stores and SuperTarget hypermarkets, totaling 1,914 locations in the U.S. and employing over 368,000 people over 20 offices globally. The company sells a variety of merchandise, including beauty and health products, bedding, clothing and accessories, electronics, food, furniture, jewelry, lawn and garden, pet supplies, shoes, small appliances, and toys and games.

In fiscal 2021, the Target replenishment network expects to flag 16.88 million cartons on inbound docks as prereceipt problem freight, due to invalid purchase orders, invalid carton or selling unit barcodes, and case-pack/store ship-pack configuration errors. Once identified, all problem freight must be properly quarantined and investigated, then placed through a resolution process involving both internal and external upstream partners. This creates congestion on the inbound docks and product delays further down the supply chain, ultimately contributing to store out-of-stocks and jeopardizing the guest experience. With the need to maintain and continuously improve the efficiency of its fulfillment and distribution processes to compete in the industry and improve guest satisfaction, Target requires more efficient problem freight resolution processes.

Seeking to lower the network-wide time to resolution for problem freight, the team conducted data analysis, stakeholder interviews, benchmarking research and process observations which led them to identify that across all upstream partners, resolution takes an average of 4.23 business days with a standard deviation of 7.05 business days. The team also found that a single upstream partner group was responsible for resolving 80.7% of problem freight occurrences. Thus, the team narrowed the project scope to focus solely on reducing the time to resolution of this partner.

In pursuit of achieving a 24-hour resolution service level agreement (SLA), the team developed a four-phase solution roadmap which anchored to establishing standardized work and direct vendor accountability, leveraging outsourcing opportunities and improving problem freight management technology. These improvements are estimated to increase Target’s revenue by $1.036 billion over the next 3 years, while reducing payroll costs by $35.3 million in the same time frame.

THE WHIRLPOOL CORPORATION

Developing the IdX Training Pathway

Student Team: Margaret Kirk – Master of Business Administration Matthew Rodeman – EGL (BSE & MSE in Electrical Engineering)

Project Sponsors: Michael Cukier – Principal Engineer, Global Advanced Manufacturing - Digital Transformation & MFG Innovation Elena Stefanko − Engineering Analyst, Global Advanced Manufacturing Engineering

Faculty Advisors: M.S. Krishnan – Ross School of Business Fred Terry – College of Engineering

The Whirlpool Corporation (NYSE: WHR) is the world’s leading kitchen and laundry appliance company, with approximately $20 billion in annual sales, 77,000 employees and 59 manufacturing and technology research centers in 2019. Whirlpool Corporation’s GAME (Global Advanced Manufacturing Engineering) team is tasked with creating new manufacturing systems to deliver winning products for consumers. Through digital transformation, they have been able to establish foundational technologies, build production intelligence, and help deliver new, innovative products for a digital world.

Whirlpool’s GAME team has identified Industrial Digital Transformation (IdX) as a key strategic initiative to drive forward their manufacturing processes globally. As part of IdX, Whirlpool is introducing new technology and collecting new data. In order to fully utilize the new technologies they want to make sure their workforce is capable and prepared. In order to achieve this, Whirlpool is looking for a framework for introducing training to enable the full potential of the IdX program.

In order to define the framework, the team started by looking for external benchmarks for training programs related to digital transformation at other organizations. The team also interviewed individuals across the Whirlpool organization, from assembly operators at the site to managers on the corporate side in the European region. Based on all of this research and feedback, the team was able to create this general training framework with the following sections: business case, defining stakeholders, building a timeline, developing training content, implementing training, and incorporating into World Class Manufacturing (WCM). This framework is delivered through a website in order to be easily accessible and agile as the framework is implemented and refined through experience. This framework provides guidance and resources within each of the sections as defined above and gives examples - where available - from the pilot we were able to execute at the Clyde manufacturing site. The team also outlined the plan to move forward and immediately implement this framework globally to deliver savings.

Overall the team also defined three value streams that deliver cost savings to Whirlpool through this framework. This first is time savings. Based on research as well as discussions with the team at Whirlpool the Tauber team was able to determine that by using a framework such as the one developed there can be a savings of 30% of the project team’s time. At Whirlpool, for IdX projects alone, this represents a savings of approximately $1.9M in 2021 alone. The next stream is project effectiveness. The team found that there is a potential for a 30% increase in project effectiveness by using a framework like the one defined. This translates to a potential savings of between almost $3M and $4.5M over the next three years. The last value stream is employee engagement. While this does have a direct monetary impact, the potential savings are vast. It has been shown that increased engagement can improve retention as well as boost overall morale, leading to increased productivity and reduced cost of recruiting. The overall potential savings in the next three years are between $9M and $11.5M.