Whether the cheerleaders for the new economy like to admit it or not, manufacturing remains the way much of business gets done. But the complexity of manufacturing problems and challenges requires engineers and business managers to be steeped in each other's way of thinking and working.
As Southeast Michigan reaffirms its place as the thought center for manufacturing engineering, the University of Michigan
Tauber Institute For Global Operations fuels its core, educating post-graduate students in a multidisciplinary approach to business and engineering. The Tauber Institute fuses the disciplines by putting the brightest engineering and business students into an elite academic unit. While its mission is to prepare students for global manufacturing, its graduates are just as likely to find work in any business process, including education and health care.
"The top schools are not producing people who are either interested or skilled in the area of manufacturing," explains John McGill, chief procurement officer for
BorgWarner, an automotive supplier based in Auburn Hills. He serves on the institute's Industry Advisory Board. "The best schools like the University of Michigan put out terrific students, but they often go into consulting or get into financial/Wall Street occupation. Manufacturing has become, to some degree, a dying art."
Manufacturing is far from dead, though it may be most vital far from Ann Arbor. "At the end of the day, that is the heart of the American economy," McGill asserts. "It's still where money gets made. Financial and investment companies tend to move money around." Although the service industry provides value, "there is a large population of people in this world that relies on manufactured goods."
The Tauber Institute is an academic concentration for students at the university's
College of Engineering and
Ross School of Business with a curriculum geared to issues faced by global manufacturing. Students learn to think in a cross-disciplinary way and become prepared to work in any manufacturing operation.
"The standard MBA doesn't cover this territory," explains Diana Crossley, managing director of the institute. "Not all MBAs are focused on operations and not all engineers are focused on business. We try to get a cross-disciplinary effect going." When the institute was founded in 1993, the advisory boards of the engineering and business schools identified a gap in the understanding of their graduates. The business graduates didn't understand the effect of their decisions on the manufacturing process and engineers didn't understand how they related to the overall business operation.
Tauber Institute students take both top-level engineering and business courses. "The other business students who weren't in Tauber wouldn't have taken the
"Six Sigma" class because it's an engineering class, and the "Factory Physics" class wouldn't have popped up on the radar [for engineering students] because it's geared to people who do operations management and are more interested in manufacturing," says Tauber Institute graduate Paul Paliani, a former Ford Motor Company manager who now works for the University of Michigan Health System.
Rosa Abani Bushkuhl, also a Tauber Institute graduate, is an engineer who might have thought exclusively in terms of a "data-oriented perspective," but her Tauber experience taught her "the concept of how different things connect with each other, involving the business aspect and what it means strategically. … Working with MBA students, I got a different perspective on how to solve problems than I might have otherwise." Abani Bushkuhl works for
Process Results, Inc., a Saline engineering company. "At my job, if I'm just trying to solve an engineering problem, it's one thing, but there's a lot of coordinating with people. There are different people you have to work with - engineers, trade people, management. I feel that having done Tauber, I can communicate with these different levels of people better than if I was just working with engineers."
One of the distinguishing qualities of the Tauber Institute is its focus on team work. Students compete for 14-week internships focused on real manufacturing problems. Where other academic programs offer individual internships, all of Tauber's internships are designed for teams.
"The value of the team-based approach in the Tauber summer internship is that you can split up the work and, more importantly, you can approach the project with multiple points of view," Paliani explains. "There were three of us on my summer internship at
Ford (Motor Company). We were all engineers, but we had different work experiences and two of us were MBA students. It was nice to be able to figure out where in the process each of us should work independently to learn as much as possible in a short amount of time and collect data and information."
Almost nothing is done in manufacturing today by individuals, adds McGill. The problems are too complex, often spanning multiple countries, time zones, and locations. McGill tells of a BorgWarner project involving two students in China, one student from Peru, and one from the United States. "These four students had to work on a project that was largely centered in China, but they had to communicate with each other 12 time zones away. English was the primary language in only one of the locations. It was a real challenge for them to work together and get the job done in 14 weeks.
"The most successful people in industry today will be those people who clearly can harness the value of participating in and leading a team. In some teams you'll be the chosen leader, the expert, the person who will drive the project to completion. In others you'll play a supportive role."
The Tauber Institute had 31 team projects in 2010; four of them sponsored by BorgWarner, which has been involved in the program for six years. Although they're called "team projects," McGill contends that they are much more. "It clearly is one of the most intensive consulting activities they'll probably ever do. They're given an assignment by a sponsoring company. They're limited by the time they're allowed to spend. Before they get there they're already studying the problem. Often times the projects are loosely defined because part of the learning experience is for the students to figure some of it out on their own."
While companies may commit up to $80,000 per team sponsorship, the project may yield millions in savings. As a result, companies often hire Tauber graduates.
This year's top team award - a $10,000 scholarship - went to Alejandro Pelaez, a Ross master's candidate and Benjamin Pascoe, a joint bachelor's and master's candidate in the College of Engineering. The team demonstrated that using aluminum alloys instead of steel for mold tooling at the General Motors Paint and Polymer Center saved the company $6.1 million annually per vehicle model.
Although most of the graduates from the Tauber Institute have taken positions outside of Michigan, Abani Bushkuhl and Paliani chose to remain in Michigan for personal and professional reasons. When Paliani left Ford Motor Company in 2007, he gave himself nine months to find work in the region. "I definitely wanted to stay here… but we would have moved," he says.
Abani Bushkuhl also realized the odds weren't great for finding work here, but she was committed to Ann Arbor. "I really like it here. I have family and friends here. I just love the community. The fact that it's a university town means there are so many interesting things going on."
Dennis Archambault is both a reader and
a writer. He is also a freelance
journalist and regular
contributor to Metromode and freelance
writer. His previous article was Where The Digital Meets The Spiritual.Photos
Rosa Abani Bushkuhl at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business by Doug Coombe
John McGill courtesy BorgWarner
Paul Paliani at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business by Doug Coombe
Student Andrew Burgess presents before John McGill by Steve Kuzma courtesy the Tauber Institute
Tauber Institute students giving presentations at BorgWarner by Steve Kuzma courtesy the Tauber Institute