Industry
Fuel cells for industrial, maritime and automotive applications

Description
A global automotive Tier 1 supplier is highly dependent on the traditional combustion engine business for its series products and is looking for additional pillars to secure sales, earnings and employment in the long term.

Objective
Establishment of an independent business unit that industrializes the product pre-developed in Japan in Europe and markets it worldwide.

Additional mainstay established alongside the combustion engine business within a short space of time.

The project in keywords:

  • Focusing the respective co-project management on external customers/market and internal processes/organization
  • Breaking down the goals and measures with regular tracking and agile project management
  • Rapid establishment of a hybrid project structure with a mix of internal specialists and external experts
  • Compensation for freed-up capacities and declining sales as a result of the downturn in the traditional combustion engine business

A Japanese conglomerate is the global number three in the field of exhaust gas turbochargers and supplies automotive OEMs with series products from its plants in Japan, China, Thailand, the USA, Italy and Germany. The high-volume, low-mix plant at Erfurter Kreuz, where the European headquarters are also located, mainly supplies German OEMs.

OEMs reduced their call-offs significantly below the originally planned volumes due to the general decline in the production of vehicles with combustion engines (boom in battery-electric vehicles as well as the semiconductor and supply crisis).

The Japanese parent company had developed an electric turbocharger to optimize the air supply of fuel cells and supplied it in a small four-digit number of units to a German premium OEM that produces vehicles with hydrogen and fuel cell drives.

Interim Manager (IM) Christian Lukas has been commissioned to set up an independent business unit at the European headquarters in Thuringia, which will bundle and expand the Japanese group’s global activities in the field of air supply for fuel cells.

Strategy with measures and budget planning as the basis for project success

The IM shared the project management with a permanent employee who was responsible for the technical and market areas. A basic strategic concept with measures and a timetable was jointly developed.

The necessary total costs (including personnel) and the investments for the next five years were quantified by the IM and anchored in the budget planning of the European company. This was updated monthly.

Mr. Lukas broke down the planning of the employees required for the project to monthly level, drafted the requirement profiles for the individual positions, coordinated these across the board and managed the process together with HR until the positions were filled.

Using a combination of balanced scorecard and OKR (Objectives & Key Results), the IM defined targets and measures for project sub-teams or individual employees on a monthly basis, agreed them and discussed them in the team each month. Adjustments were made where necessary. The summary served as a regular monthly report to the management.

Mr. Lukas coordinated all BU-related contracts (non-disclosure, supply and cooperation agreements with system partners as well as funding agreements) from drafting to coordination with the specialist departments, the external law firm and the contractual partners through to signing.

IM set up the recently introduced MS Teams, including SharePoint, as a central platform for networking internal and external project staff working at several locations. This was used to manage project communication within the team and with all employees of the four European companies.

Mr. Lukas coordinated the bimonthly steering committee meetings with the stakeholders of the European companies and the Japanese parent company, recorded the results of the meetings and was responsible for following up on open issues.

(Partial) coverage of the fixed costs via a funding project and first pre-series order after less than 12 months

Within twelve months, 30 employees were recruited for the project. This includes 15 employees who work exclusively for the new business unit and have either been hired externally or transferred internally to the new business unit.

The investment volume for the next five years was in the low double-digit million range; break-even was planned for the fifth year.

The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is funding a project submitted jointly with Chemnitz University of Technology and Silver Atena (power electronics) to optimize the air supply in fuel cell systems with EUR 11 million over a period of three years.

The first prototype sales of electric turbochargers were made to nine customers from the automotive heavy duty, industrial and maritime sectors.

A letter of intent for the first series delivery, starting in 2023, has been concluded with a major customer from Scandinavia.

An agreement was reached with the Japanese parent company to bundle all global Group activities for electric turbochargers for use in fuel cell systems at the European headquarters in Thuringia.