In a nutshell, the team helped the stakeholders discover and bring together the hidden knowledge within the organization, which helped them make an informed decision.

Ann Arbor, MI – Oluwabunmi Fatodu (MBA '22) and Sasanka Mouli Neti (MSE-IOE '21) started with a blank slate for their 14-week Tauber team project for leading Tier 1 automotive supplier, Stoneridge. The team worked toward identifying a specific target opportunity within an 8-million-unit Total Available Market, while building a strong value proposition. Fatodu and Neti built a comprehensive playbook for Stoneridge to deliver on the opportunity they uncovered, adding more than $76 million in revenue over the next five years.

“The biggest challenge the Tauber team initially faced was the greenfield nature of the project,” said Neti. “The fact that this is a new product for the company, coupled with the challenges that 2021 posed, meant that the stakeholders were left with limited availability to workshop and brainstorm the value proposition.”

The Tauber team identified a forward-looking manufacturing strategy, along with a detailed development timeline after carefully evaluating the capital expenditure, floor space, and labor requirements for different manufacturing facilities that Stoneridge operates. After modeling the budgetary impact of various manufacturing scenarios, the team identified combinations that would be most profitable to Stoneridge once production began.

Neti said, “Once the Tauber team was able to connect the different dots we obtained through interviews, brainstorming sessions, and factory visits, we quickly understood that the best way to provide a strong value proposition to the relevant customer base was to leverage the synergies between two separate devices that are currently used for this function and integrate them into one piece, not only reducing the cost, and consequently price, but also reducing other system complexities."

Read more about the 2021 Tauber team project for Stoneridge >