Automotive recall from the perspective of Project Management

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the problems of recall in the automotive industry which occurred in February and how project management can help in situations like this. He explains that there is an increasing pressure on time and lower costs, leading companies to a greater exposure to risk.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the show. Five Minutes Podcast Today. I like to discuss one message that I receive it from . He sent me a message talking about the recall in the automotive sector that we face that in the last month, Andy, he asked me to make a comment and maybe produce a podcast that I'm doing right now to discuss and understand this using a project management perspective. So which kind of process failed in this recall what was missing?

What was well done and not well done? What were the two challenges on doing that? The first thing is that I'm not a specialize it in the automotive sector. So I will use the glasses of a project manager and fore. Sure. A lot of technical problems happened to lead to this recording. But again, a lot of management process failed to produce these recall and why I am saying this because in every single business risk is a part of this business.

So risk, there is no risk free business, and there is no risk free Automotive sector. There is no risk free life. Everything has an intrinsic risk on that. And what is the challenge is to manage that what is happening right now? Speed, speed, cost reduction. Aren't the most important words in the mind of everybody in all minds.

So we need two time to market. We need to produce a product fast, quick. And what happens is that when you rush one thing that you will face for sure is the quality and the risk. It's impossible. If you give me two minutes to prepare something or two hours, the results will be different. And this is not the problem of this two or three companies that face at this problem with recall know, no, this is not only their problem.

They were very unlucky because this could happen with most of the companies because the people they are looking only on the speed and cost. They're not investing in the right project management and the right process. And what I'm telling you that is that using the right tools and the right project management process, you will anticipate the problems. You will see the problem earlier and, and you will manage the critical process.

It's impossible to produce a that does not crash. So what we need to do, we need to reduce this risk to a minimum risk so we can handle that. But it's impossible. If you tell me, Oh, I want to produce a plain that does not crash. Then you need to revisit your business because there is no plan that we'll do that up to now. So what does the challenge here?

Its to use the right process and to combine a very aggressive time and scatter Management. But in the order hand, a very aggressive of risk management and extremely aggressive quality management and procurement management. If we look to the automotive sector to produce a car, they use hundreds of suppliers. And for sure this was a failure in one supplier.

So it's not only to say, Oh, the problem is that X, Y, or Z or a care producer know it's all the change that needs to revisiting the management process. Each not only doing market and not only doing sales, they need to revisit and replan the process of product development. They need to revisit that, to anticipate this kind of risk, to understand the procurement process and to match and to integrate this.

Okay, we need to be a, to challenge our skeletal. Okay, that's great. I listened this to this and I received this request every single day from every single customer client. So in the other hand, we need to understand that this challenge will cost us something and we'll need to manage much more careful all the processes. And we need also to prepare ourselves to crisis management. And sometimes what we see is a lack of crisis management.

When something goes wrong, we do not know how to proceed. And it's extremely important to lead with the trouble. We are very well educated to deal with success, but we are not so well educated, trained, and to lead with something that goes wrong. And we can see this all the time on the news all the time on the news. So what we need to think now we need to think how we can improve the Management process.

And this will lead us to help and the technical side, because it's very easy to say, Oh, there is a problem in the break. There's a problem in the airbag system. And I try to put this and the technical around that, but most of the problems are related to business and to Management maybe these airbag problem comes from a rush and the supplier that didn't check there, well, the system to activate or deactivate them.

So we feel, look, everything goes back to Management and Management is far one of the cheapest way of improvement. It's extremely cheap. Can you prove Management process? The challenge is the control side, but this is extremely easy. In your other hand, this will lead us to do less mistake in a much more expensive areas. So I'd like go only to share that this comment with you, I'd like to thank a level two or four, let me know, and about this perspective and I hope you enjoy this podcast in this discussion and see you next week with another five minutes PM.

Podcast bye. Bye.

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Automotive recall from the perspective of Project Management

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