INTERVIEW WITH PAUL SOETENS, MANAGER OF SQDE TEAM
When did you start your career at MTEE?
I started my career at MTEE back in 2003, so I have now been in the company for almost 15 years. My first role in the company was as an application engineer for the sample shop with the mission to expand and develop that so it could be ready for the growth of the turbocharger business, which started to take off in those years. It would be hard for most people to imagine what it looked like back then compared to what it is today.
Around 3 years later, I started working as a design engineer in Catia for different projects. Related to this, I went to MHI in Japan for a three-month internship to align design tasks and improve communication between departments. It was a very exciting time personally and professionally, and I’ve benefitted from the time I spent at our mother company.
In May 2007, I started as project engineer for the BMW diesel team. At this time, we were working on the BMW M47 and N47 (Euro 5) projects. This was one of the first VG turbochargers that we developed at MTEE. I became team leader for JLR diesel in 2011 and for the Daimler team in 2017. In March 2018, I decided to step into a totally new challenge. I left the core engineering section and moved to my current role as manager of the supplier quality development team (SQDE), which in part was newly established, as a member of the purchasing department. – Instead of focusing on customers, I now concentrate on the supplier side. I would like to use the understanding of how OEM’s help us on a greater level to help our suppliers reach the same higher level. The success of MTEE is in many ways inter-dependent on the performance of our suppliers!
What is your background?
At secondary school, I found out I wanted to go into car electronics. As a result of this interest, I started a technical education in electronics, followed up by automotive technical study at the HAN Automotive Institute in the east of the Netherlands. After graduation, I worked for nine months at a company that did vehicle adjustments for handicapped people and fire trucks, etc. I left that company when MTEE offered me a very interesting job!
What is the role of the SQDE team?
Since March 2018, MTEE SQDE team and MTEE purchasing began combining to form one team. Its main goal is to establish a healthy pool of suppliers for all components. There should be enough suppliers, but moreover suppliers should excel in different aspects such as delivery performance, quality performance, development performance, etc.
Being at MTEE for so many years I have a great deal of experience in how the OEM’s have helped to develop us (MTEE) as a supplier, and I want to pass that on to our supplier base. Besides that, everyone is aware that changes and adjustments made after Start-Of-Production (SOP) are highly undesirable as they are expensive, need to be made under a lot of time pressure and require a lot of energy to be implemented. A lot of effort in the development of components is therefore needed. This saves energy that should be used to set up cost down sessions and the execution of continuous improvement activities with suppliers.
Why was the re-establishment of this team important?
MTEE decided to merge purchasing and SQDE to bring some disciplines together. This should result in changing the focus from reactive to proactive. The supplier base for the turbocharger business is not as big as one might think. This is one of the reasons why it is important for us to co-operate closely with the few good suppliers there are. We don’t have the luxury of selecting suppliers from a big list as some companies do. Our suppliers are our close partners so we have a great interest in helping them to develop.
How has supplier management changed over the years?
Due to the rapidly changing turbocharger market, a much higher degree of flexibility is required from our suppliers these days. Turbochargers have gone from being a niche product to almost having become a commodity product. This has naturally brought along an increased focus on price and production optimization. Furthermore it results in a greater need to further decrease the risk of having issues in development and after SOP. At the same time, technical expectations have risen. This reflects on our suppliers who also need to constantly adapt to these changes. This in turn has changed the way suppliers in our business should be approached.
With the establishment of the SQDE team, what changes do you expect to see in the future?
I want to see a much stronger and more stable purchasing department where suppliers develop products that meet all necessary requirements. I also wish to see all MTEE departments benefit from the positive results produced by the SQDE team. Additionally, and even more importantly, I really hope the recently established teams enjoy working together. At the end, the joy in people’s work reflects positivity to suppliers, and this is the starting point of motivation.
