GERMAN RUA COLLAZO
jorge davila
IESDE School of Management
Gabriela Sánchez Bazán
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The automotive industry demands technologies to reduce non-renewable resources consumption, and to meet these expectations personnel skills are essential. As these kinds of specialists are very limited and expensive, the solution has been to develop an “Automotive Specialist Training School.”
To provide trainees, this “Automotive Specialist Training School,” Gestamp, recruits high-skills engineers at the local universities and also promotes internal candidates at no cost for them. As it was detected that in this kind of position most of the engineers were males coming from expensive universities, one of the goals was to recruit also women and engineers coming from low-income areas.
Training lasts nine months. During the first part of the training, all the engineers receive the same training: Automotive Industry, Gestamp Culture, Competencies Development and a wide variety of technical aspects. After this first stage, they receive training in two of the special technologies of the company: Press Hardening and Laser Cut. For this, they are divided in two groups, and the number of technicians on each technology is decided according to Gestamp needs.
As the way to manage those technologies, Press Hardening and Laser Cut are very customized by Gestamp. The professors are mainly internal engineers, managers and directors that have been in the company for many years.
As mentioned above, Press Hardening and Laser Cut are two very special and customized technologies by the group. For those reasons it's very complicated to find engineers to fulfill the open positions, and the few on the market are very expensive. So “having our own school results in huge savings in salaries, but even more important is to have customized engineers,” said Germán Rúa, New Technologies Manager for Gestamp Mexico Region and responsible for the school.
The direct results of the innovation are:
1. Savings in salaries.
2. Create a strong engineering team exactly trained in what the company needs for an extended and controlled period of time.
3. Work with the engineers in projects to reduce row material and energy consumption.
4. Productivity increase due to process optimization by the engineers.
Having these engineers with skills they cannot learn in the university gives the company a big competitive advantage: fresh blood with ideas for innovation and improvement.
One task of the engineers is to run projects to optimize the process, giving results in productivity increases and scrap savings. This translates to money results in less hours needed to produce (savings in energy consumption and salaries) and less consumption of steel. Reducing the hours needed for production could represent also to avoid purchase of new machinery and/or square meters in the plant to run new projects.
Savings for Gestamp mean also savings for the environment. Every kilogram of steel that Gestamp saves represents a kilogram that is not produced. Gestamp's actual goal is to reduce 70 tons of steel scrap per plant in 2019.
In addition, as a result of process optimization, the number of hours needed to produce a specific batch of production is reduced considerably. This reduction of hours causes that the equipment can be shut down reducing mainly the consumption of power, gas and water.
From the special point of view, as mentioned before, Gestamp emphasized in incorporating women and people from low-income areas, areas with a lack of opportunities that normally don't have direct access to these positions. The “extra” of this is to have engineers more engaged with the company.
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Gestamp is an international group dedicated to the design, development and manufacture of metal automotive components. The group specializes in developing innovatively designed products to achieve increasingly safer and lighter vehicles, thereby reducing energy consumption and environmental impact.
