VCE:
Tons of waste in engineering department. Very low efficiency. Negative profit on some of the products. Not enough margin to support a healthy business. Keep loosing talents. People still working here are either stuck or haven't found a better job.
Engineering department:
1. Way too many managers not enough worker bees. Layers after layers of management, which provides little to no value but they sure adds a lot of waste.
2. Incompetent managers. Way too many 'resource manager' who don't understand the technology their subordinates work on. Rely heavily on their engineers to tell them how to improve their work. When they finally use their own judgement to improve a process or fix a problem, its often impractical or offering little value . No motivation, no morale, no pushing for results.
3. Incompetent people. Its not uncommon to see incompetent people with years of 'experience'. The ironic thing is a couple of those incompetent people actually got promoted to managers.
4. Wrong design methodology--rush to finish the design first and then do cost reduction.
5. Sometimes 'Volvo Way' gets in the way of efficiency and performance. Not holding people accountable for their performance. Tremendous 'respect' and tolerance for repeated slackers.
6. Outsourcing doesn't work as expected. Outsourcing is very common nowadays. When practise right it can be and is supposed to be very beneficial.
