Freight Car Manufacturer
SITUATION
Largest domestic producer of freight cars asked Highland to reengineer its product life cycle process to address design reliability and customer satisfaction issues.
DRIVER GOAL
- Develop design processes to reduce warranty cost by 17%.
- Develop and implement process improvements to support additional annual operating earnings.
RESULT
- Developed a product consolidation strategy to reduce structural diversity and maintenance of design.
- Reduced initial warranty cost per line shipped by more than 17%.
Issue
The largest domestic producer of freight cars asked The Highland Group to reengineer its product life cycle process to address design reliability and customer satisfaction issues that were driving a large reserve for warranty costs into its financials.
Highland Approach
The Highland Group conducted a Discovery and Design process that identified and detailed key issues, the specific approach required to achieve the desired results and the projected benefits.
Actions Taken
- Developed and deployed a customized stage gate engineering process that aligned time-phased design tasks to deliver vehicles fully compliant to Federal Department of Transportation requirements.
- Developed a design analysis process to screen, control, evaluate and approve structural design content of cars altered by customer requirements, usage or railroad environment changes.
- Re-aligned and rewrote Engineering procedures (30) to establish auditable documentation that complied with regulatory requirements.
- Streamlined and simplified a multi-corporate acquisition legacy system for Engineering change control that enhanced the process, clarified procedures and adjusted organizational roles resulting in less paperwork, better control and clearer accountability.
- Implemented control measures reducing reliability risks from unproven designs.
- Assisted management in the full deployment of the concurrent engineering process across 21 product lines and 6 manufacturing plants.
- Developed and implemented archival management strategies and processes for ”as built” histories, vendor drawings and the structural “record of type” in support of design, warranty reviews and litigation.
- Developed a customer information database tool that provided access to all pertinent customer technical specifications and requirements by freight car type.
- Implemented improvements to customer management and responses to RFQs.
