Based in Königswinter, Germany, Maxion Wheels is one of the most reputable and trusted companies in the vehicle parts manufacturing industry. The organization, founded in 1908, is the world’s largest wheel producer and is striving to become the first carbon-neutral manufacturer in the market.
As a worldwide organization with workers from many different backgrounds, Maxion Wheels continuously has over fifteen hundred major projects in progress. Their initiatives range from operational excellence, continuous improvement, engineering, CAPEX, supply chain, IT and innovation projects.
Emine Uslu is a Regional Operational Excellence Manager at Maxion Wheels and oversees their operational excellence project management. For the past several years, Emine sought to improve visibility, increase cost savings, and pass value on to their customers.
Maxion Wheels has plants and locations all around the world.
The Challenge
Maxion Wheels did not have a digital platform to provide instant insight into continuous improvement and operational excellence projects.
Prior to 2018, Maxion Wheels used spreadsheets to track project management and execution.
This situation stymied progress and created a gap between when information was retrieved and when it was presented. Company leaders were not getting the most up to date information which prohibited timely and data-driven decision making. Additionally, spreadsheets were tedious to manage and maintain.
The company utilized Project Charter templates that were in Excel, and they were not standardized for all functions or the whole company. There was no ubiquitous platform for sharing all projects.
Teams were using various types of metrics to track savings and different methods and tools to monitor KPIs. This was generally done in Excel with numerous formats that could not be compiled nor reconciled.
There were no up-to-date reports. Manual work was needed after data collection in Excel to build reports that were prone to errors.
As a result, the World Leader in Wheels decided to enact change.
The company needed to find a method to gain instant visibility and access to project dashboards to offer consistent and useful metrics for all stakeholders. Most critically, Maxion Wheels wanted to find more efficient ways to reduce waste to turn cost savings over to their customers. Additionally, they sought standardization and wanted to have an end-to-end platform for project and program management.
The Solution
To provide instant visibility and intelligible metrics, ideas needed to be managed in a central repository and reviewed in a structured manner to make timely data-driven decisions. This was critical when considering how to reduce waste and turn more cost savings over to customers.
Since Maxion Wheels used Minitab Statistical Software for data analytics, which led to more successful projects, the company naturally turned to Minitab to pilot the end-to-end idea and project management, execution and tracking solution— Minitab Engage.
In 2018, during their pilot, Maxion Wheels wanted to see how Engage could help to standardize project management templates, if it could provide tools for Lean Six Sigma, and how instantaneous project status updates would impact productivity. Management recognized the benefit Minitab Engage could have, so it was brought on officially in 2019.
For Maxion Wheels, project management begins with an idea that can be rejected or approved and developed. With Engage’s workflow functions, projects can have a larger scale. Engage enables teams to keep track of all projects and to instantly gauge progress in the appropriate cycle such as DMAIC, Just Do It, or DFSS.
Maxion Wheels' project teams run their tasks and report on progress. Engage’s cloud-based infrastructure aggregates their data for project reporting automation, which populates online dashboards that are accessible to all, ultimately leading to more opportunities for collaboration.
Results
Maxion Wheels has steadily increased their Engage usage over the past five years. Recently, Maxion Wheels managed roughly 1,600 projects in Engage with their 1,500 users and 237 administrators.
Since all reports are instantly visible to administrators in Engage, company leaders were able to quickly take proactive actions when necessary. There was never a need for the team to do manual data pulls since all data and reporting were always current and up to date. Leaders on all teams could simply monitor operational excellence projects and increase communication and productivity among teams.
The results of their hard work were powerful. A key objective of the Maxion Wheels Operational Excellence organization is to contribute to annual improvements in productivity, which is measured by the average operating cost per unit. Prior to using Engage, the talented team achieved incremental cost savings of 6.8% each year. After incorporating Minitab Engage as the Project Portfolio System into their Global Operational Excellence and Quality Digital Framework, the team boosted annual savings over 19%, delivering cost savings of 8.1% each year thereafter.
The Global Opex and Quality Digital Framework at Maxion Wheels is based on 6 pillars: Virtual Plant Model, Project Portfolio System, Policy Deployment, Maxion Management System, Maxion Team Awards and Quality.
This graph demonstrates how actual savings have increased since implementing Minitab Engage.
Note: 2018 was the pilot year.
Minitab Engage dashboards tailored to Maxion's KPIs and key metrics are reviewed monthly in productivity meetings across business units by top and middle management teams, which leads to enhanced real-time ROI and communication. Due to the usage of Engage, Maxion Wheels has been able to meet demands, increase production, and lower costs for consumers.
Each year, the company holds an awards ceremony called the Maxion Team Awards (MTA) for top performing teams. In those events, operational excellence, production natural work, administrative and support teams compete to be the best in their categories. Project maturity checklists, financial baselines and final results provided by Minitab Engage all helped to compare the reports. This allowed for a data-driven decision to select the winners.
For Maxion Wheels, the implementation of Minitab Engage resulted in cost savings, time savings, enhanced visibility and program management, and more efficient teams.
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The Organization
Maxion Wheels
The Challenge
Due to difficulties in accessing project data and standardizing templates, Maxion Wheels sought to implement a digital platform for tracking continuous improvement projects.
Products Used
Minitab® Statistical Software
Minitab Engage®
The Solution
Maxion Wheels deployed Minitab Engage for centralized project management, standardized templates and real-time updates, resulting in increased productivity and collaboration.
The Results
Maxion Wheels currently manages 1,600 projects with Engage.
Minitab Engage helped to boost Maxion Wheels' annual savings from 6.8% to 8.1%.
Maxion Wheels achieved a drastic increase in total hard savings after adopting Minitab Engage.