Interview with Stefan Oehmke

I've been with Vibracoustic for over 15 years and originally started out in Neuenburg/Germany for our customer Ford. I quickly took over responsibility for other customers and three years later, I was sales manager for a product group with over 100 million EUR annual sales.

After that, I built up the key account Daimler for a few years in Stuttgart. In doing so, I have learned that personal success as a "face to the customer" depends considerably on the performance of your company.

I wanted to understand how production works and how the process from customer request to serial production can be run more efficiently. That's why I did the master's degree in Production & Operations Management at the HECTOR School in Karlsruhe.

With the knowledge gained there, I built up the Vibracoustic business in China for over 4 years. At that time, our plant in Yantai had 15 employees. Today that number has risen over 300. In such a growth situation it´s an obvious need to understand how theory and practice are related.

Vibracoustics strategy is to grow globally. We are very successful in Asia and North America and our market penetration in Europe has always been very high. To keep it that way and to keep growing, we secure our cost leadership and extend our product portfolio. At the same time, we invest in research and development in order to meet the new requirements of autonomous driving and electromobility with innovative products.

We are involved in the global competition for the best technical solution. In order to win, we need clever minds with high technical competence, who have fun working together in cross-functional teams, for demanding customers. Our European customers are becoming ever more global. China is, for example, a very important market. For us, it is crucial that a product developed in Hamburg is industrialized at the same time in factories in Europe, Asia and North America and that it has the same quality. This has become a success factor for Vibracoustic.

For me personally, it is challenging to lead a global team with employees in different countries and continents. It is exciting to work across time zones and cultures with the goal to be more successful tomorrow than today.

In the automotive industry, a life cycle takes about 6 years. A smooth transition between development and mass production is required, because every mistake costs money and endangers the delivery to the customer. Both are not compatible with our goal of cost and quality leadership.

At the HECTOR School, I've learned to identify waste and define measures to simplify and accelerate complex processes to make them more efficient. This can be applied in production as well as in administrative processes.

Leadership in global projects requires assertiveness, social skills and high technical expertise. It helps to understand the contribution the project-related functions must make. Through the broad training at the HECTOR School, I have expanded my skills in all these areas. I can easily relate to different departments like logistics, production or process engineering. This supports the continuous improvement enormously.

As a technology-driven company, we need to react quickly to changing conditions and find technical solutions. Take electric mobility, for example: electric cars lack the typical engine noise, and so the driver perceives other noises more clearly than before. We reduce vibrations where they arise through specially designed product ideas to reduce disturbing noises to a minimum.

At Vibracoustic, we share global good and best practice. If a factory, process engineer, or logistics specialist has a good idea that works well in one of our plants, it will be forwarded to all our sites worldwide within weeks as an implementation proposal. This is how good examples set precedents.

We have begun to focus our plants on just a few products or product groups. This was one of the methods that I learned in my Master's thesis at the HECTOR School with Professor Kai Furmans; using the product / process matrix to identify the main processes and systematically make them lean. That’s exactly what we do today, only at a bigger scale.