From the shop floor to my own project

Continental Automotive · Timișoara, Romania · 2019–2020

Continental makes the instrument clusters behind a car’s steering wheel: the speedometer, the warning lights, the screen in the middle. I started in the sample production department, building prototypes by hand. 2 months later I was running my own project.

In numbers

• Time: preparing a sample shipment went from 2 days to 1, and the weekly status report, about 3 hours of spreadsheet work, became a live dashboard.
• Money: fewer rushed deliveries cut express freight by about €18,000 a year.
• Errors: late or incomplete sample deliveries fell from 6% to 1%. On the line, I checked about 300 clusters before they went to the customer.
• Adoption: about 25 people in 3 groups used the dashboard, and 4 colleagues were trained on the workflow.
• Scale: about 40 sample shipments a month for an international car maker.

On the line

I worked next to the mechanical technicians: assembling clusters, analysing each step of the process, and checking analog and digital clusters before they went to the customer. You learn how a factory really works by doing the work yourself.

Assistant project manager

Then I got my own project: logistics, customer service, planning and resources for a cluster programme for an international car maker.

• 3 groups to keep aligned: engineering, production and the customer.
• A digital dashboard that tracked every sample and delivery, replacing a spreadsheet passed around by email.
• Lean improvements that cut the time to prepare a sample shipment from 2 days to 1.
• 4 colleagues trained on the project’s workflow, so it didn’t depend on one person.

What stayed with me

Large companies run on process. The process is usually right; the tools around it often aren’t. That gap, between how the work should flow and the spreadsheet people actually use, is where I’ve worked ever since.