Team Projects

At the heart of the Tauber Institute educational experience is an opportunity to achieve results in a real-world setting. All Tauber students complete a 14-week, paid Team Project with a leading firm.

Tauber Institute Team Projects are unlike internships in other programs. Tauber Institute Team Projects are specifically designed for Tauber students and target substantive operations issues with business and engineering components. A typical team consists of three Tauber students, with at least one business student and one engineering student per team. A Tauber Institute project gives you the opportunity to experience a true consulting project with potential for significant savings and return on investment.

Jason Clark“Tauber has been a truly challenging and rewarding experience. During my summer project, our team was given significant control over the depth and scope of our project. It was only after exchanging summer experiences with non-Tauber peers that I could truly appreciate the advantage Tauber had given me both academically and professionally.  As I prepare to enter a career in management consulting, I am confident that the skills I developed at Tauber will continue to pay dividends long into the future.”
Jason Clark, MBA 2010

Both to test and demonstrate your skills, you need responsibility and the opportunity to succeed. Instead of showing how well you can maintain the status quo, you work toward integrating business and engineering disciplines to make your sponsoring company faster, smarter, and more efficient for today's competitive landscape. Companies work in concert with the Tauber Institute to build special projects for you that can showcase your ability to make a difference in a team environment.

Tauber Institute team projects offer the following:
  • Substantive, consulting-type experience with leading companies
  • Executive-level support and access within the sponsoring company
  • True teamwork and leadership experience
  • Historical high placement rate with participating companies
  • Salary premium over comparable internships.
Team Project monthly salaries are as follows:
  • $1575 to $1750 - Graduate students with five or more years of full-time work experience
  • $1275 to $1450 - Graduate students with more than two, but less than five years of full-time work experience
  • $1000 to $1175 - Graduate students with less than two years of full-time work experience, including EGL students entering their fifth year of study.
Upon project completion, all teams compete in the annual Spotlight! scholarship event. Spotlight! is a highly competitive event where all teams present project results to corporate representatives, students, alumni and faculty. Senior-level executives from industry serve as judges and evaluate projects on the basis of scope, implementation, impact, overall presentation skills and other criteria to determine the winners of approximately $40,000 in scholarship prizes.

Note: Some sponsors restrict team projects to domestic students.

View the list of 2011 Team Projects

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Sample Results from Recent Team Projects

The Boeing Company - Commercial Aviation Services

Lean Process Improvement and Product Alignment Strategy

Boeing's Commercial Aviation Services (CAS) division provides creative solutions and customer support by offering aftermarket products and services to commercial aircraft customers. CAS products, including kits of parts used for aircraft modifications, maintenance, repair, and major upgrade conversions, are supported by two different business units: Material Management and Technical Services. As a result of Boeing's merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, four distribution centers produce these kitted products, resulting in process inefficiencies and additional overhead and labor costs. The Boeing Company challenged the Tauber Institute team to analyze the kitting distribution value chain at each of these four facilities, identify opportunities for improvement, and recommend alternative scenarios to the existing product alignment and distribution infrastructure.

The team studied the four distribution centers using lean tools to compare the kitting processes throughout the facilities. Investigation of best practices in the aftermarket maintenance industry, both internal and external to Boeing, facilitated the development of a lean kitting process, yielding a drastic reduction in inventory holding costs and process flow time. The team conducted a pilot implementation at one facility with support from the Sustainability Committee, a group of Boeing employees organized to continue and sustain implementation activities across the four facilities. Applying the principles developed in the lean kitting process, the team created a Process Improvement Guide to support the Sustainability Committee in further implementation efforts, specifically detailing five focus areas for improvement. The team also proposed strategic business reconfiguration scenarios to support the changing products and future growth of the aftermarket business. Through evaluation of the benefits, costs, and risks associated with each scenario, the team developed a detailed Scenario Guide for management to drive further investigation and implementation of the optimal strategy.

Full execution of the team's lean process improvement recommendations will lead to an average kit flow time reduction of over 60% and inventory holding cost savings of at least $20 Million annually. Additionally, the roadmaps for improved product alignment created by the team will drive Boeing's future strategies, improving Boeing's competitive position in the aerospace aftermarket industry.

BORGWARNER THERMAL SYSTEMS

MANUFACTURING OPTIMIZATION AT BORGWARNER CADILLAC PLANT

BorgWarner is a product leader in highly engineered components and systems for vehicle powertrain applications worldwide. BorgWarner’s Cadillac manufacturing facility has 110,000 square feet, employs 208 employees, and manufactures fan drives used in commercial diesel vehicles in the North American medium and heavy duty truck market. To meet increasing demand (sales are expected to increase by about 50% between 2010 and 2012), the plant needed to improve the floor layout.

The existing layout was a result of numerous factors, including recent additions of capital equipment, elimination of older bottleneck operations, and changing business conditions over the past few years. Processes were disjointed and individual product lines did not have dedicated floor space. The net effect was substantial material handling amounting to more than 28 hours per day and 24.4 miles per day of product movement.

The team determined major improvement opportunities by value stream mapping the three main product lines and by creating Pareto charts identifying excessive material handling times, inventory levels, and inventory footprints. Using the findings, the team developed an optimized plant floor layout grouping each product line while opening up available floor space for a new product. The team also developed a set of process changes including introducing multiple one-piece flow washers, purchasing additional quality check machines, and purchasing a base component line sequenced by the supplier. These recommendations achieve the following results:

  • $1.15M in material handling and inventory savings over the next five years
  • $383,861 of inventory elimination, representing approximately 11% of the facility’s total inventory (included in the figure above)
  • 10.1 miles of reduction in daily material handling
  • 8,500 square feet of newly available floor space, which could allow for up to $6.3M annual revenue of new business production

With the team’s recommendations in place, the facility will be able to effectively support increasing production demands caused by increasing market share and product sales.

FORD MOTOR COMPANY – VOME Global Paint Engineering

Recycling Saturated Limestone Waste into Sound Deadening Products

Ford Motor Company is a global leader in the automotive manufacturing industry. As part of its push for automotive leadership, Ford is focusing on a global sustainability strategy that applies to both the products it manufactures, and the way in which these products are manufactured. Within Ford, Global Paint Engineering is currently evaluating the feasibility of a new paint booth featuring a dry scrubber technology. Rather than the wet sludge waste currently generated, this new paint booth produces a dry, paint-saturated limestone waste (SLW). The current state proposed by the paint-booth manufacturer is to send the SLW to a cement kiln, where it would be co-processed into cement.

The Tauber team was challenged by Global Paint Engineering to establish the feasibility of enhancing the sustainability benefits of the new paint booth by recycling the SLW into Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) products used in Ford vehicles. Specifically, the team worked on establishing the material feasibility and optimal process for incorporating SLW into NVH products.

The team performed a battery of tests, at Ford and supplier sites, to better understand the SLW’s characteristics and its compatibility within NVH products. Concurrently, the team worked with suppliers to understand the NVH products manufacturing process, identified challenges of adding SLW into this process, and developed an optimal solution that overcame these challenges. Based on this work, the team recommended that Ford look into shipping the SLW to supplier sites, where it can then be fully incorporated into the NVH products.

With the team’s SLW recycling approach, Ford is project to save upwards of $570,000 a plant over the current wet system, of which $120,000 of this can be directly attributed to recycling the SLW rather than sending it all to a cement kiln. Additionally, this approach could reduce a plant’s CO2 footprint by 130,000 lbs. a year. Finally, by using the SLW as a raw material rather than sending it to a landfill as a waste, Ford will reduce the risk of legacy costs and offer greater benefits to society as whole.

 

View Full Listing of Past and Present Team Project Sponsors


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