Transportation-142

The Situation: 

The largest domestic producer of Freight Cars identified reliability and customer satisfaction issues that were driving a large reserve for warranty costs into their financials.  They asked The Highland Group to re-engineer the product life cycle process to address the design reliability and customer satisfaction issues.

The Driver Goal:

• Develop design processes that will reduce warranty cost by 17% and support consistent performance
• Develop and implement process improvements to support additional annual operating earnings for the Freight Car Business over a predicted period of time - primarily from reduced warranty costs

• Developed and deployed a customized Stage Gate Engineering process that aligned time phased design tasks to deliver vehicle 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 the Engineering process 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
• 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 created access to all pertinent customer technical specifications and requirements by Freight Car type.
• Redesigned the Request for Quote system to screen incoming customer requirements, identify pricing drivers, and develop more accurate quote packages
• Delivered the high definition-screening tools required to verify customer content requirements and developed the relationship with Sales to increase quality.
• Redesigned RFQ formats and content required to create a standardized “look and feel” to the engineering product and re-engineered the RFQ process

• Developed the product consolidation strategy to reduce structural diversity and maintenance of design
• Implemented reliability control measures reducing reliability risks from unproven designs.
• Implemented improvements to customer management and responses to RFQs
• Reduced initial warranty cost per line shipped by more than 17%
• Achieved full compliance to federal audit requirements