Roles and Responsibilties:

This position is responsible for providing leadership and strategic direction to team focusing on new product development based on modular approach. The responsibility also includes definition and execution of strategy to setup new technologies and skills in alignment with globally defined footprint. The position must have strong vision towards upcoming technology demand from automotive customers to ensure required frontloading.

The client is developing to a network organization, a tight connection and good communication to the Functional Leads (VP’s, Directors and working level) needs to be established to ensure a collaborative approach, throughout the whole organization at all levels.

Industry

• Demonstrate strategic thinking & drive the team towards success in line with organizational goals 

• Support Global Research & Development VP in continuous analysis of automotive market trends and technologies in order to evaluate and guarantee business potential for today and also for future in alignment with Business Unit 

• Should have excellent collaboration with cross functions to collect improvement feedback for existing platforms and modules to maximize the usage of components

Financial 

• Ensuring development of “Best Value” components aligned with organizational product quality standards 

• Responsible for planning & controlling annual budget for the department considering planned headcount, tool investments, technical trainings for team (aligned with strategy) and operational expenses

Technical 

• Establish an “Innovative mindset” within the team to evaluate “out of the box” ideas to maximize reusability of developed components 

• Technical governance to a large cross functional team structure 

• Ensuring fully validated components with excellent balance among costs, time and quality parameters 

• Enable the team to closely work with cross functions like purchase, Industrial engineering and Quality to ensure sustainability of developed components in terms of cost, quality & performance

Leadership 

• Ensure availability of right skilled resources at right time for development of strategic platform components (close co-ordination with HR required) 

• Provide guidance to the head of departments for Mechanical, system and Electronics development teams which may also extend partially to software aspects of the product 

• Evaluate performance of the leadership team for compliance with established objectives, policies and contributions in attaining objectives, in conjunction with the functional leads.

• Manage & improve the resource skills for engineering for cross-functional customer project and product segment teams 

• Future goal-oriented, innovative leader with a view “Beyond The Lines” 

• Transformation Competence 

• Define, facilitate and execute corrective actions in case of non-performance and unexpected business changes for all functions reporting to the position

• Provide suggestions to improve processes and implement best in class solutions, raising quality and productivity in a calculated way in alignment with the global Research and Development organization 

• Foster and maintain a positive & collaborative work environment to motivate cross functional team driving process improvement and innovative solutions 

• Close co-operation with the cross functional departments such as HR in terms of recruitment & personal skill development of the team members 

• Ensuring right maturity of the products as per organizational quality standards 

• Maintaining team experience level at a high standards comparable to corporate standards 

• Goal setting, performance evaluation & professional development of the team 

• Close communications with peers from global locations to collect the resource requirement based on each function 

• Professional reporting and improvement of the team & project performance 

• Ensure best practices, standards, lessons learned inside the department & also enable sharing of knowledge with cross functions 

• Ensure smooth execution of company’s procedures, policies and standards

Additional Duties and Responsibilities 

• May perform other duties and special projects as assigned by the disciplinary and functional reporting manager

Business Travels

• Up to 20% (global locations & local customers)

Candidature

• Bachelor / Master degree in Electronics, Mechatronics or related areas 

• Above 15 yrs. of professional experience, with at least 5 yrs. of experience in leading large product development teams in Automotive domain (at least 100+ employees)

• Fostering Teamwork, strong team player

• Knows how to integrate different opinions and come to joint decisions

• Strong understanding of modular approach for product development (building standard platforms for reusability) with high focus on standardization

• Strong understanding of product development and validation aspects based on “V” cycle of development or similar

• Techno-managerial experience in centralized platform development team would be an added advantage

• Excellent presentation, oral and written communication, organizational and analytical skills

• Strong international and multicultural mindset combined with a team-oriented leadership style