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Several factors influence a company working culture including its industry, its geographical region, as well as the cultural and the educational background of its employees. Despite these, Japanese companies have successfully transferred a company’s working culture from Japan to other countries [2], so that only minor regional differences in productivity remain. Such transfer is possible with a strong process oriented mind set and working style. This paper examines the change in a working culture associated with the prototyping of exhaust systems in India. That change required a shift from a reactive “firefighting” mode of working to a structured, projectable and reliable working environment. The goal was to achieve increased in-time delivery, higher quality, greater flexibility, more innovation and reduced cost. The same process approach may be transferred from India to other parts of the world, while allowing for country-specific influences on a company’s working culture.

After having successfully implemented Lean in Tenneco's Clean Air division, Tenneco Europe decided to expand Lean to its other divisions - Ride Performance including Aftermarket in 2011. These divisions were able to fully benefit from the best practices developed over the last 10 years. The implementation was articulated around two major axes: the execution of complex projects related to processes including several functions and sites. This approach allowed us to reach a critical mass in a reasonable time within the different functions and sites; the execution of smaller projects focused on one specific function,e.g.: Engineering or Sales. This approach is complementary to the first one since it enhances the spread of the lean spirit within the organization. This paper focuses on Tenneco's Ride Performance division and is split into two parts.

Rybnik Engineering Center (REC) is the new R&D center developed by Tenneco in Poland. One of the key ideas behind the REC is to develop it based on the lean engineering principles. In a first step a white paper was established and agreed upon with senior management. This white paper consisted of: a vision a set of objectives derived from this vision and a road map to reach this vision The creation of REC has been articulated around 3 major themes: 1. PERSONNEL - It is about how to identify and hire people that will fit into our lean culture. A further challenge is to then train and mentor the people. A similar model known as the inverse-T at Toyota was implemented. Lastly, a network of partners has been established and integrated in the Tenneco development processes. 2. PROCESSES - Both engineering and cross functional processes have been systematically reviewed or new ones developed.

To improve the effectiveness within a development, it is essential to eliminate waste. Several tools focus on this goal: Lean Engineering, Lean Manufacturing, Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) and the Best Methods approach. However, none of these tools are focused on the sharing of knowledge. Modification on a development or production process influences all stages of a project. By a coupling of all processes, all influence factors are covered leading to the strategy of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). All data which belong to development, logistics and sales are saved and administrated in a global information center. The existence of such a center and the evolution of design tools give us the opportunity of sharing process knowledge between all participants of a project. This data sharing process allows us to manage and optimize processes using objective criteria in order to find the best solution. In a dynamic world changes occur at all levels of a product development cycle.

Six Sigma was developed by Motorola in the 1980s as an enhancement of their Total Quality Management (TQM) approach focusing on quality improvement. Companies such as General Electric (GE) developed the concept even further and extended the application of Six Sigma tools to their entire business, including the development of new products, with a focus on both financial gain and customer satisfaction. Six Sigma, however, also offers a rigorous, data-driven procedure for process and product improvement and for the development of new products and processes using proven methods and tools taken from the Quality Management and Quality Engineering toolbox. Integration into the existing engineering culture and the application of these tools and concepts to a typical application at a leading global exhaust system supplier are outlined in this paper. The procedure which is used for measuring the surface radiated noise is analyzed in detail by the principles of Six Sigma.

Up to now Six Sigma has mainly been used for manufacturing. A Six Sigma approach was introduced in 2004 at Tenneco for transactional business This paper illustrates 2 examples where Six Sigma was successfully applied to improve the service quality. One first case is the improvement of a measurement system analysis [1]. In the exhaust system domain the acoustic performance of an exhaust system must meet the requirements in terms of drive-by noise of a vehicle and in terms of subjective sound. Therefore it is vital to measure the so-called “tailpipe noise” of an exhaust system with precision and reliability. Otherwise some iterations take place to confirm the data, or - more critical - an exhaust system design can be rejected when in reality it is just meeting the target curves and inversely, this could be accepted when the targets are not met.