Senior Program Manager - Simultaneous Development Team

About the role

Adient is looking for an experienced Senior Program Manager with complete launch experience to lead its Simultaneous Development Team (SDT) in Plymouth, Michigan. The manager represents the team professionally to the customer and Adient management, motivates the team to meet timing commitments, mentors and coaches the team, resolves conflicts and negotiates with internal groups, vendors and the customer.

Key responsibilities

• Act as the central communication point for the SDT, set the meeting cadence, create agendas, schedule meetings, keep them on task, issue minutes and include key suppliers.
• Manage scope: communicate the impact of scope changes to the customer and SDT, publish and maintain the customer SOW and SSOWs, manage engineering change risks and the overall change management process.
• Manage the financial roadmap: schedule monthly finance SDT meetings, manage financial targets, roadmap dates, actions and costs, and work with the commercial team to improve profitability.
• Manage program timing, maintain an open issues list with due dates and deliverables, and lead the SDT in risk management to meet on-time gate exits.
• Meet product requirements including specifications, functional expectations and FMVSS, support the manufacturing plant on product issues, and bring VA/VE ideas to the customer with engineering.
• Maintain strong customer relationships, keep the customer informed early of problems, archive key correspondence and gain internal consensus on engineering changes before sharing them with the customer.

Required profile

• Demonstrated leadership experience.
• Five years of experience in engineering, manufacturing/quality or finance.
• Five years of project management experience in program, engineering or manufacturing/quality management.
• 10 years of experience in the automotive industry, including at least one vehicle launch.
• Knowledge of the automotive design/launch process and working knowledge of program management processes and tools.
• Seating product and launch experience is a plus.