Federal Mogul Case Study

Future Projects:

David’s company Federal Mogul has a few future projects that David was able to discuss with us. The rest are confidential. The first is re-instituting a LEAN system. Federal Mogul no longer has a LEAN system in place, but David and his colleagues again see it as beneficial. This started when the new CEO recently started observation of warehouses’ OAE (Operations Assets Efficiency), which tracks down time. He saw that there was increasing down time and that they were below capacity in warehouse. The new project David is doing is trying to implement LEAN in warehouses to solve these efficiency problems. So far, he has found that there was machine problems that were causing tons of scrap metal that was not being repurposed and

was just waste. So now they are taking the waste metal and repurposing it.
He also told us that soon he will be in charge of hiring, training, and educating new employees on LEAN and raise awareness of its benefits.

David plans to use a similar to the “5 whys” to find the root causes of the machine problems so that they can achieve maximum efficiency. This is in an effort to reduce costs and reduce the amount of stock needed. As Vice President of Quality & Customer Satisfaction Powertrain Segment it is his duty to increase efficiency and quality in all departments.

Federal Mogul’s next order of business is too build a new RDC facility, because eliminating all RDC’s was a mistake. It was bad for competition with Companies like AutoZone. RDC stands for “Regional distribution Center”. These facilities were eliminated so that they can ship directly from RPC’s or Regional Production Centers. The idea was to eliminate what was seen as unnecessary costs.

Furthermore, Federal Mogul is trying to take lead as the number one distributer in Pistons/Cylinders. Federal Mogul is currently the leading supplier of Friction (brakes, disks, ext.), but is just number two in Pistons/Cylinders. He did not further elaborate on his methods to take the lead in Pistons/Cylinders, but it seams as if Federal Moguls strategy in this endeavor may be to buy up as many smaller suppliers of these products as

possible.

Career Leader Lessons:

What we gained from our interview with David was wealth of experiences and knowledge. He had experiences from all over the World, in many different Eras of time in the global economy, and in many different levels of his company. David dealt with everything from the recession, to corporate bankruptcy, and life as a college student.
One lesson is that Studying abroad is great for gaining experiences that school can’t teach you and that learning another language can be very beneficial. During his interview he told us that his after all of his French classes he still wasn’t fluent. So he went to take classes in France and that finally eliminated his accent. In other words he had to actually be there and talk with real people. Learning a language is best done in that country or environment, so one can attain the “real language”. He was then able to take jobs in other countries from these experiences. This was a key factor to his success.
In everything in life you will always become better from experience and taking the initiative. Books and short classes are never enough. This concept applies to many areas; it is not limited to language. Studying a topic is not enough; people need real life experiences to become proficient.