Team Project Descriptions

Boeing Delivery Center

The Tauber Team was assigned to identify best practices to paint customer specific decorative liveries for wide bodied aircraft for the Boeing Company. The team will combine institutional knowledge and data analysis to create a uniform set of procedures designed to reduce total process and rework time, as well as variability in the painting process. Finally, the team will test this methodology on incoming planes to assess its effectiveness and sustainability.

Brose

Brose is a global supplier of automotive systems for seats, doors, and drives. This project aims to create a cost model for capital equipment that provides the engineering and purchasing departments a transparent method of approximating the investment required to create a new product or expand production capabilities. It should improve productivity, establish a solid basis for cost of capital and value-added services, and provide a knowledge base for new engineers and buyers to understand equipment costs.

Dow

The Dow Tauber Project team works to evaluate the potential adoption and use of autonomous motor carrier technology within Dow’s supply chain. This will include an analysis of Dow’s current processes and strategic goals to determine the fit of this technology.

DTE Energy

A market and technical analysis of the non-wire alternatives to aid in the creation of a cost-benefit model will be completed. Use of the model will allow DTE to identify cost reduction opportunitiesthat could berealized by implementing non-wirealternativesto defer substation capacity investments.

Ford Motor Company

Ford is a leading automotive OEM, with a revenue of $160 billion in 2018 and business all around the world. It is the second-largest U.S.-based automaker and the fifth-largest in the world. The Tauber team is working with the Advanced Manufacturing Center out of Ford's new Redford facility to develop an artificial intelligence-enabled tool that will automate and optimize the allocation planning process.

General Motors

The Tauber team is focused on developing decision-making tools to capture the total system cost presented by additive manufacturing opportunities, allowing GM Global Manufacturing leaders to make better informed decisions. The project will also chart the development of an additive manufacturing ecosystem that fosters innovation and increased value creation throughout the organization.

Pfizer Clinical Manufacturing

Pfizer is on the ground floor of a pharmaceutical industry-wide disruption with both an increasing difficulty to consistently deliver blockbuster drugs and the shift towards precision medicine product streams to serve smaller populations in personalized cancer therapy and rare diseases. To address these challenges, Pfizer has identified the need to develop a more streamlined, innovative approach in clinical manufacturing in their Sandwich, UK facility. The purpose of this project is to improve the utilization of the Sandwich facility to empower Pfizer to deliver increased batch throughput with greater value-added activity and reduced cycle time within the same resource constraints, thus delivering a greater portfolio of clinical trials and reducing the time it takes to get new medicines to market, enabling success for Pfizer’s ambitious plan to bring 15 new drugs to market by 2022 and meet the many unmet needs of patients globally.