The Ultimate Test Drive
Internship at Harley-Davidson is a valuable learning experience
By Sarah Foote, Editor, News@MITSloan
March 8, 2006
They say that opportunity only knocks once, but for Aimee Vessell, LFM ’06, opportunity came riding in on a 500-pound motorcycle. Not only did Aimee have a great 6.5-month internship at Harley-Davidson’s Powertrain Plant in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, she learned a lot, helped out with scheduling operations and inventory management at the plant, made a lot of great friends, and landed a full-time position in the company’s Leadership Development Program. Back at MIT Sloan School of Management for her last semester, Aimee has already reconnected with her classmates and has been working on her thesis, which will detail her internship project as well as explore demographics at manufacturing companies like Harley-Davidson.
Prior to returning to school for an advanced engineering degree and an MBA, Aimee worked for Camp Dresser & McKee as an environmental engineer and project manager. The consulting position had her traveling all over the country to work on construction, demolition, hazardous waste, and wastewater management projects. Aimee says she enjoyed the work because she had the opportunity to work within many levels of an organization on things such as design, negotiations, budgets, and pricing. Traveling across the country from Syracuse, NY to Libby, MT afforded her the chance to work with different people on each project: project engineers, laborers, construction managers, demolition experts, and upper level managers. When an anthrax scare threatened the Washington, D.C. area post 9-11, Aimee was one of the engineers brought in to help analyze the situation and oversee decontamination crews.
Although Aimee enjoyed the work, the nearly 100 percent travel over nine years was difficult and she began to think about a career change that would allow for a life style change as well as allowing her to continue using her engineering skills (Aimee has a undergraduate degree in environmental engineering from Northwestern University as well as being a Professional Engineer). She liked the idea of manufacturing, feeling like it would be a good corollary to the site-work that she enjoyed. After a discussion with a friend’s husband who had been through the LFM program, she knew the combination of an MBA and engineering degree would be the perfect fit for her. “I like the ‘traditional’ manufacturing environment. You have the factory floor as well as the management side of the business working side-by-side – blue collar and white collar working together. That’s the combination I really like and I need that kind of variety. I looked into it and thought it [LFM] sounded really interesting. I was ready for a career change and LFM has allowed me to do this in an extremely effective way,” says Aimee.
Aimee, originally from Chicago, had selected Harley-Davidson as her first choice for her internship. She had always been interested in motorcycles (previously owning a Harley), wanted to put her new manufacturing skills to test, and thought returning to the Midwest for nearly seven months was appealing. “I wanted an internship that was traditional manufacturing, and where I would be able to practice some of the skills that I learned over the last year. I wanted to have a factory floor that I could go to,” says Aimee.
Even though Aimee had ridden motorcycles before, prior to leaving campus in May ‘05, she and a fellow LFM ’06 classmate, Christy Prilutski, took a riders course and got their motorcycle licenses. She knew she would want to ride while working at Harley-Davidson and even attended the two-day mechanics class offered by Harley-Davidson University.
Aimee purchased an ’86 Sportster at the start of her internship in June ‘05. Starting with practice runs in a few parking lots, coupled with lots of patient guidance from her passionate motorcycle riding co-workers gave Aimee the confidence to continue riding into the fall. “At Harley-Davidson, there are even special parking areas for people who ride to work. The motorcycle parking is right up front, and the people who work there are really passionate about their bikes. It’s really a showcase--all these different motorcycles lined up. Talk about great free marketing.”
The plant where Aimee worked manufactures and assembles powertrains – essentially the engines and transmissions for three families of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Powertrain units are delivered by truck to two final vehicle assembly plants in York, PA, and Kansas City, MO. Trucks are scheduled to leave the plant twice a day and the powertrains are loaded in a specific sequence determined by final assembly, so it was crucial that the plant not only stick to the schedule, but that they always had all the necessary parts to create over 75 different powertrain unit combinations. Too much inventory would be costly, and not enough would slow production down. It was a challenging inventory management issue that Aimee set out to tackle. “The assembly of a powertrain unit won’t begin unless all parts are available – this is important for quality and process control. If there are any parts unavailable when a certain unit comes up in the schedule they would need to ‘cut’ that unit out of the schedule until they are able to make it,” says Aimee. “The tough part about a cut from the schedule is dealing with the need to maintain the specific truck loading sequence I mentioned before – a truck cannot leave the plant until it has the exact units sequenced in the schedule and that affects the timeliness of delivery to the final assembly plant – our customer.”
Aimee looked at causes for ‘cuts’ in the schedule - essentially, why there were occasions when they did not have every one of the hundreds of parts needed to build the powertrain unit when they needed it. Many components are produced in-house, and those are the parts that Aimee focused on. In addition to being a powertrain assembly plant, the Pilgrim Road plant also manufactures all the major engine and transmission components from castings and forgings with operations including machining, grinding, powdercoat (painting), heat treating, etc. Aimee’s project was to develop an inventory management system for all the parts needed for these operations. The number of any given part needed depends on demand, variability of demand, and how long it takes the part to be processed from start to finish. “The location where a part is held before going to assembly is often called a ‘Supermarket’ or ‘Marketplace,’ so I developed what I called a Supermarket calculator that could be used by plant personnel to give them an idea of the right amount of inventory they would need to make sure they didn’t run out of parts. That way, we could right-size all of the Supermarkets so there would be as much inventory as we needed, but not too much. Too much gets expensive,” says Aimee.
Aimee worked on developing inventory strategies for Harley-Davidson while keeping in mind different variables such as model and color in addition to trying to make the calculator easy to use and available to those who were actually responsible for managing the inventory. In addition to accounting for parts demand and lead time (how long it takes for a part from start of manufacture to arrival at the finished Supermarket), she also attempted to capture other sources of variability including machine downtime (planned and unplanned) or scrap (a part that cannot be used). Aimee says that it’s all a pretty basic inventory management scenario, but crucial to all operations of the plant. This is where her LFM classes helped her – determining the right amount of parts that could not only cover what they needed on average, but also during the more unusual, higher demand events.
“Having the Supermarkets sized right is important for having enough inventory on hand, but it can also be extremely useful to the machine operators when it helps them to make decisions about when to switch between different parts if there is one machine that performs an operation on more than one part.By having a visual Supermarket on the floor, the operator can see when they are running low on a certain piece or when they’ve made enough of another,” says Aimee.
In addition to working with engineers, supply chain specialists, operators, and skilled trades in the plant to tackle the scheduling and inventory management project, Aimee took advantage of other key resources at the plant to help her to understand the more strategic end of the business. “The General Manager of the Plant, Rod Copes, LFM ’93, was a great resource for me. He wasn’t my direct supervisor, but he took time to be involved in my learning experience. We met every other week or so to talk about the business, making business decisions and his experiences at Harley-Davidson from Investor Relations to Plant Manager. There was a lot of leadership learning there and I tried to reciprocate with some feedback about my observations in the plant,” says Aimee. Another LFM Alum, Greg Smith (LFM ’93) was also close-by as the Director of Manufacturing projects at Harley-Davidson and was also involved in a good deal of knowledge sharing with Aimee.
“All the answers were there. I just had to pull the information out of the right people at the plant and then champion their efforts. I also found it valuable to run ideas by my classmates. I was toying around with different models to use on these calculations, so I sent out a few ideas on e-mail and people would make suggestions or let me know what worked for them. It was great feedback. It’s a unique network. We’re a pretty tight group,” says Aimee of her LFM classmates.
Aimee has only good things to say about working at Harley-Davidson and the employees she met there, noting that they take great pride in their work and are the biggest sticklers for quality products because the piece they are working on could end up on a bike they purchase. “Harley-Davidson employees are some of the biggest customers. It’s a $5 billion dollar business, but surprisingly only about 80 percent of that comes from actual motorcycle sales. The rest is parts and accessories, general merchandise, and Buell motorcycles,” says Aimee.
Aimee is looking forward to the start of her full-time position at Harley-Davidson in late July, where jeans and Harley-Davidson shirts are worn everyday by many employees and executives. Seeing her supermarket calculator in action will be another perk. “I’m happy to be back at MIT Sloan to enjoy the last semester with my amazing classmates, but I must admit I’m also anxious to get back to Milwaukee and Harley-Davidson. It’s a great company with great people and I can really get behind a company with a mission statement that begins with ‘We fulfill dreams…’” says Aimee.
Aimee plans to travel around the country visiting former colleagues, friends, and family before arriving back in Wisconsin. If she can convince one of her friends in the LFM program to join her, she’ll bring her Harley-Davidson Sportster. Ready to ride at any time.