GETRAG Corporate Group

Launch of a New Product Development Team and Supply Chain in the NAFTA Market.

The Client

GETRAG Corporate Group is the world's largest independent manufacturer of transmissions delivering an annual volume of three million transmissions and one million axles.

The company yields approximately 2.5 Billion Euros in revenue, and has over 13,000 employees worldwide. The customers of GETRAG Corporate Group include Ford, Chrysler, Audi, BMW, Ferrari, Fiat, Renault, Porsche, Mercedes Benz, Smart, VW, Nissan, MINI and Toyota.

With 23 production facilities worldwide, the GETRAG Corporate Group is represented in Europe, Asia and North America.

The Challenge

In 2007, GETRAG Corporate Group formed a new North American partner company called GETRAG Transmissions Corporation (GTC) as part of a major expansion into the US and NAFTA markets.

The challenge was to deliver a 350 Million Dollar investment business transformation project, consisting of the establishment of a new lead entity in the US and a new Dry Dual Clutch Transmission which would be produced at a new, low-cost product plant in Mexico from a new supply base.

In addition, the program was made more complex by the split of the engineering across the two GETRAG sites in the US and Germany, multiple programs running concurrently with aggressive and often competing timelines, and 85% of the components of the Dual Clutch transmission shared between the customers.

The Pcubed Solution

Pcubed's Program Delivery and Process Solutions offerings added tremendous value to the client by allowing them to increase the experience of their relatively new organization through the expertise and knowledge of Pcubed consultants.

Through Pcubed's strong client insight, the team was able to identify critical gaps in the organizations' ability to deliver this critical and complex project. For each gap identified, Pcubed merged the split engineering and competing process landscapes across the two countries to develop a customized but blended solution. Pcubed also didn't stop at the recommendation; we defined and then actually delivered the solution to all levels of the organization.

Key elements of the solution included:

• Development and delivery of Rplan tool project plans for the various programs, with linkages to customer timing, GETRAG milestones, supplier engineering, testing and manufacturing
• Implementation of a workable change management process, with a structured Change Control Board and established governance process that achieved the necessary alignment, escalation and decisions across the multiple functions and geographic locations. Improved throughput in managing changes reducing quantity of changes in the system from 170 to less than 30
• Development and delivery of an Access Bill of Material (BOM) tool, including planning, process development and testing, designed to link the approval of an engineering change to piece price, Engineering Development and Test (ED&T) costs, investment and sales price to an updated business plan, with customized reports for the various department needs. Reduced the amount of duplicate BOM's from 5 to 1
• Administration of Design Review and various Module Meetings, including agenda and minutes distribution, discussion facilitation and issue resolution management outside of the meetings
• Recovery of the upcoming prototype phase through a readiness assessment, recovery plan development and action management across areas including supplier sourcing, incoming inspections, part deviations, part delivery concerns, prototype build capacity and engineering changes
• Performance of quality assurance for the established processes, providing visibility on throughput and actions needed to address variances