Spotlight! 2006: A Showcase of Excellence

The Spotlight! 2006 event was held on Friday, September 15 at the Four Points Sheraton in Ann Arbor, MI. Seventeen teams of TMI students presented the results of their summer projects and competed for a total of $30,000 in scholarship awards.

Each team presented its project results to an audience of corporate representatives, students, alumni and faculty. Judges from the operations industry evaluated the projects on the basis of scope, implementation, impact, overall presentation skills and other criteria to determine the winners.

TMI congratulates all of the student teams and sponsors for their support and participation in the 2006 summer projects and the Spotlight! event. We look forward to working with our sponsors on summer 2007 Team Projects!

Spotlight! 2006 Winners

First Place: Boeing 777 - Wilfredo Durand, Taoufik El Khazzani, and Vince Giovannetti gave the winning presentation of their 14-week summer project titled "777 Functional Test Optimization." Each team member was awarded a $4,500 scholarship.

Second Place: Pfizer, Inc. - Jonathan Gregg and Samantha Jarema came in second place for their project titled "Pfizer Clinical Supplies Solid Dose Manufacturing." Each team member was awarded a $3,500 scholarship.

Third Place: Dell, Inc. - Sunit Chauhan, Damon Dance, and Nitin Sharma took third place with their project titled "Excursion Risk Mitigation and Customer Experience Enhancement through Strategic Supply Chain Collaboration." Each TMI team member received a $2,500 scholarship award.

Honorable Mention: John Deere - Caroline Conway, Jens Nielsen, and Karen Putterman received an honorable mention for their project titled "Getting to Global: Building Export to Russia." Each team member received a $1,500 scholarship award.

Click on the link(s) above to view the project descriptions of the winning teams.

2006 Project Teams

Click on the company name below to view the team project picture!

To view the project descriptions of all seventeen teams, click here to download the Spotlight! 2006 Project Book (PDF).

First Place:

The Boeing Company, 777

"777 Functional Test Optimization"

Student Team:
Wilfredo Durand - MBA/MC
Taoufik El Khazzani - EGP (Master of Science Industrial and Operations Engineering)
Vince Giovannetti - MBA/MC

Project Liaison/Supervisor:
Tim Thomas - Manager, Airplane Systems Engineering

Project Champion:
John Pricco - Director, 747/767/777 Engineering

Faculty Advisors:
Ted O'Leary - Ross School of Business
Sebastian Fixson - College of Engineering

Following what was an intense downturn, the aerospace industry is now in the midst of a strong worldwide recovery of demand for new commercial aircraft, in large part for their increased fuel economy in light of record fuel prices. These elevated fuel prices have squeezed airline profits and have dictated extremely competitive aircraft pricing as a primary driver in their procurement. Competition between Boeing and its primary rival, Airbus, is more intense than ever as both companies struggle to reduce their prices. Boeing recently reclaimed the industry's top spot over Airbus, a position Boeing had relinquished for approximately five years. Key to this reversal of fortunes has been the success of the 777, a wide body fuel-efficient aircraft with which Airbus cannot currently compete. The success of the 777 has prompted Airbus to launch a revised version of their A350, due to enter commercial service in 2012.

Boeing has made the strategic decision to capitalize on current market conditions by decreasing the 777 cycle time from four days to three. As the final station in the assembly line prior to aircraft rollout, the functional test sequence has become a precarious bottleneck which will hinder cycle time reduction and compromise other Lean mandates. The TMI team provided Boeing a methodical approach to reduce functional test flow time from six days to three by addressing four key aspects of functional test:

• Critical Path Definition
• Process Variability
• Test Content
• Responsibilities and Interactions of the Organizations that comprise Functional Test.

Implementation of the team's recommendations will reduce WIP and eliminate the need for added capacity and labor costs. Boeing will realize first year savings of $22M, subsequent annual savings of $4.5M, and a decrease in working capital of $30.7M. These significant outcomes will help sustain high margins on the 777 as worldwide demand remains strong for this aircraft.


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Second Place:

Pfizer, Inc.

"Pfizer Clinical Supplies Solid Dose Manufacturing"

Student Team:
Jonathan Gregg - MBA/MC
Samantha Jarema - BSE/MSE Industrial and Operations Engineering

Project Liaison/Supervisor:
Paul Stuart - Head of Global Clinical Supply Manufacturing & Packaging

Project Champion:
Gerry Boushelle - Head of Clinical Supply Manufacturing Operations, Ann Arbor

Faculty Advisors:
Bill Lovejoy - Ross School of Business
Semyon Meerkov - College of Engineering

Pfizer, the world's leading research-based pharmaceutical firm, has historically invested heavily in the initial phases (I-III) of research and development, where the probability of product failure is substantial. However, due to the increasingly competitive nature of the industry, Pfizer is moving to a "fail early, fail often" strategy in which minimal investment is made until a drug product has progressed further. Pfizer Clinical Supplies Solid Dose Manufacturing (SDM) supports the discovery and exploratory phases, I and II, of the solid dose drug product development with two facility locations: Ann Arbor, Michigan and Sandwich, England. In order to fully support the "fail early, fail often" strategy, Ann Arbor SDM challenged the TMI team to decrease their cycle times, while simultaneously increasing on-time delivery, both of which are key concerns in an industry where delaying a product launch can cost in excess of $600,000 per day.

Upon the TMI team's arrival, SDM's current state was a "black box". There were processes not standardized, metrics not collected and ambiguity regarding SDM goals and the roles and responsibilities of the workers. Realizing that a culture change was necessary for success, the team mapped the current state value-stream and defined and displayed key metrics, creating a focus on accountability and performance goals. Then, using lean concepts such as supermarkets and production leveling to develop strategic process improvements, a future state was created that will reduce SDM's lead time by 50% and increase on-time delivery to 85%. Collectively, these changes will lead to an annual cost savings of $800,000 and additional annual profit of $30M by reducing the time to market. The successful implementation of several of their recommendations has facilitated culture change and, before the team's departure, reduced cycle time by 11%.

To ensure sustainability, the team worked with Pfizer to establish a global, cross-functional implementation team, supported by Director and VP level management. This team is responsible for implementation of the TMI project, and will drive continuous improvement. It has established specific goals which have been incorporated into management and employee performance reviews.


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Third Place:

Dell, Inc.

"Excursion Risk Mitigation and Customer Experience Enhancement through Strategic Supply Chain Collaboration"

Student Team:
Sunit Chauhan - MBA (Non-TMI Student)
Damon Dance - MBA/MC
Nitin Sharma - EGP (Master of Engineering in Manufacturing)

Project Liaison/Supervisor:
Charles Revelle - Manager, World Wide Procurement

Project Champion:
David Brown - Vice President, World Wide Procurement

Faculty Advisors:
Damian Beil - Ross School of Business
Dawn Tilbury - College of Engineering

Dell Inc. is a key player in the global market for information technology. Dell's competitive advantage lies not only in its lower cost structure but also its efficiency. Its core strategy is the direct-to-customer business model. Dell combines this low cost sales and distribution model with lean production operations performing mass customization. As the company continues to grow its business to reach the target of $80 billion in revenues by 2008, tracking large amounts of information and having real-time access to key data points is extremely critical. In addition, Dell's focus on customer satisfaction and its increasing global presence requires an increased velocity throughout the supply chain.

The Dell-TMI project contributed towards the corporate goal of enhanced customer experience by improving component level traceability, visibility, and velocity within the supply chain through collaboration with its tier-1 and sub-tier suppliers. The team accomplished this by implementing traceability for high value components like chipsets and other application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips on printed circuit board assembly parts such as motherboards and graphics cards. In collaboration with the Intel-TMI team, the Dell team developed a concept which could become an industry wide standard for part level information collection and sharing among different supply chain partners.

As a part of problem identification process, it was found that in the past, failures in chipsets and ASIC chips have caused large field excursions with significant customer experience and financial implications. The impact was exacerbated in many instances due to incomplete or inaccurate traceability information. To address this problem, the TMI team studied current part marking technologies such as laser etched 2D barcodes and alpha-numeric coding. The team then worked with different technology vendors to evaluate the use of various data acquisition technologies like Automated Optical Inspection (AOI), Automated X-ray Inspection (AXI), Multifunction Pick & Place, Stand Alone Robotic Scanning System and Electronic Lot Coding. An important goal in the technology evaluation process was to select a scalable solution that could be easily implemented for other component families and product lines. As a proof of concept, three different pilots were conducted at Equipment Manufacturer (EM) locations in China. The pilots involved testing the use of different data acquisition technologies and development of a real time web-based data tracking system. Based on the analysis of pilot results, the Dell-TMI team recommended a phased implementation plan to achieve unit level traceability and data sharing with supply chain partners.

Finally, a data input form was developed to collect and consolidate information on past excursions and classify their financial impact into different cost pools. A thorough business case analysis was performed to quantify the impact of the project on future excursions. The financial model validated the initial hypotheses and showed that complete implementation of the project will result in up to 50% reduction in excursion over containment and a 75% reduction in the total cost of an excursion. In addition, sharing of traceability and consumption data with the suppliers would allow them to optimize their operations leading to a leaner supply chain and better customer service level.


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Honorable Mention:

John Deere

"Getting to Global: Building Export to Russia"

Student Team:
Caroline Conway - Dual MBA and Master of Science, Natural Resources and Environment
Jens Nielsen - EGL (BSE/MSE Industrial and Operations Engineering)
Karen Putterman - Dual MBA and Master of Science, Natural Resources and Environment

Project Liaison/Supervisor:
Thomas Priest - Senior Engineer

Project Champion:
David DeValut - General Manager

Faculty Advisors:
Len Middleton - Ross School of Business
Tassos Perakis - College of Engineering

John Deere is one of the oldest manufacturing companies in the United States and for much of its history has focused on the U.S. market. In recent years, the company has increasingly emphasized international markets to sustain its growth. Since 2004, Russia has emerged as one of these markets. As a result, the company opened an assembly facility in Orenburg, Russia for Air Seeding equipment (supplied by the North American Air Seeding factory in Valley City, ND) and established an independent branch office in Moscow. After two years of operation, the Russian export business has not met John Deere's financial goals or matched Deere's North American reputation for stellar product quality.

The TMI team reviewed the current state of the Russian export business and identified three areas where immediate improvements could be made: 1) improving the North American manufacturing process to minimize missing parts in container shipments to Russia, 2) providing a local parts stock in Russia to increase production quality and service levels, and 3) improving overall cost performance by identifying and reducing logistics and inventory holding costs.

The first, and perhaps most significant, issue facing Russian export is missing parts in container shipments from the Valley City factory to the Orenburg facility. In 2005, with the best-case product, Orenburg received 55% of the machines complete. (With the other products, only 4% of the machines were complete.) In order to address this problem the team developed assembler training documentation, an improved labeling and audit system, shadow boards, and a new specification structure for export assembly. These improvements were tested on the 3 most complex assembly centers, resulting in 0 missing parts. The company has since adopted all of the team's recommendations for this year's build season. In addition, 4 temporary employees have been assigned to rewrite the specification structure for all exported Air Seeding products.

The second area was providing a local parts stock in Russia. In order to protect against human error that may occur in the assembly process and to ensure that machines sold in Russia are serviced to Deere standards, the team secured funding to stock parts at the Orenburg facility and at the new Moscow parts depot. The team then developed a safety stock model, and placed an order that will stock 280 part numbers at the Orenburg facility allowing it to reach a best-case first-pass-yield of 100% and will stock 100% of critical service parts for Air seeding products at the Moscow parts depot. In addition, the team developed and supplied the Moscow Branch with a database to manage future inventory levels.

The final area of focus was identifying and reducing logistics and inventory costs. The team identified a total of $209,700 in excess logistics charges for shipments to Russia and Kazakhstan and $162,000 in avoidable inventory holding costs. In order to eliminate these costs, the team built several recommendations into a scheduling model that will result in immediate downstream savings. The Valley City factory has adopted this scheduling model for this year's build season. With the improvements made by the TMI team, John Deere will be able to take steps toward building a successful business in Russia and continue the reputation for superior quality machinery across the world.


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