FMEA international: Successful training with Brose in Shanghai

China is one of the most dynamic car markets in the world. More and more car parts suppliers from Germany and Europe have therefore set up their own research and development departments in Shanghai, Nanjing or Beijing. Brose is one of them.

When it comes to development, the world’s fourth-largest family-owned car parts supplier is banking heavily on the Asian market. The dynamic global company’s Chinese headquarters are located in Shanghai. That’s also where DIETZ Consultants recently conducted a successful four-day FMEA training programme.

FMEA-related challenges and risk management in Asia


Coached by Lassie Li (who is a member of the executive board of DIETZ Consultants Nanjing) and Winfried Dietz, the people responsible for risk management and FMEA at Brose applied practical exercises and best-practice examples to concrete issues pertaining to current projects. At the end of the four exciting and productive training days, there was a lot of positive feedback from the team in Shanghai. Our training programme provided them with the tools of the trade that they will need in order to be able to deal with the special risk management challenges that go hand in hand with an era of shorter and more complex development cycles.

30 years of experience with customised customer requirements


Although we don’t have a 100-year tradition like Brose, what we do have is 30 years’ worth of experience with FMEA, risk management and the special customer requirements of major car parts suppliers. Furthermore, our multicultural team containing experienced trainers from Germany and China (who also work in America, Korea and Malaysia) also made it possible for us to overcome the linguistic and cultural challenges that can emerge. For us, Brose is a client that is both unique and representative. The globally-active company handles several sites, cultures and languages. We factored all of this into the equation while setting up and organising the client-specific training programme. This enabled us to implement specific qualification-related details in a manner that took the rules that apply to all participants into account.

Systematic and early avoidance of potential errors


As a tier-1 supplier that provides electro-mechanical systems for driving and door and seat systems, Brose has to fulfil the stringent requirements of the automobile industry. There is also the challenge of synchronising the German head office’s specifications for FMEA development with the needs and capabilities of the Chinese and Korean sites. Over the course of the FMEA training programme, the people responsible for the respective domains at Brose became familiar with methods and processes that make it possible for them to use professional analytics tools to avoid potential errors in an early phase of development. We have already been collaborating with Brose for several years in this area, and would now like to continue this joint effort in Asia as well.