Delivering dramatic and sustainable change for a troubled, global automotive Tier-1 supplier

As well as failing to meet customer requirements on time and in full, significant costs were being incurred from product sent to scrap and rework, overproduction, shortages, expedited shipping and recruitment. The supplier faced a significant challenge to regain normal status in order to de-risk their relationship with the customer, secure future revenue, improve efficiency and reduce waste.

The main challenges were:

• Reducing quality report issues from 30 to less than 12 per month, within the next 6 months
• Defects of 500 Parts Per Million (PPM) to be reduced to less than 30 PPM
• The supplier needed to eliminate 15,000 parts arrears and achieve 70% of parts delivered on time and in full
• A scrap level of over 20% would need to be significantly reduced to help bring costs under control

Shortfalls in capability and high staff turnover meant that, to meet the challenge, this automotive parts supplier would need to assess, train and certify all of their front-line team leaders to the basic skills necessary for their role.

The Unipart turnaround team set to work alongside front line staff and leaders to restore operational grip. The key elements of this were:

• Training staff across the business in the use of problem solving systems and visual management in daily work.
• Deploying our award winning team leader training programme.
• Setting up an area of to showcase best-practice and demonstrate the results
• Developing and implementing a site logistics strategy.
• Implementing a system of layered audits and a peer-to-peer sustainability audit.

...

Our client has reaped significant result from Unipart’s support and capability transfer. All of the original targets have been met, if not exceeded. Crucially, this automotive supply chain partner has now exited ‘special status’ after meeting customer targets consistently for 90 days. This has not only saved the contract, but has also ensured that the supplier can bid for new contracts in the future.

To see the full results and to look further into how we helped this global tier-one automotive supplier to restore operational grip, download the full case study below: