The upheaval facing automakers is well documented and at the centre of daily discussions in boardrooms, online meetings and the shop floor. From my perspective, local original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can navigate the flux in SA’s automotive sector by:
- Investing in proactive, data-driven quality management;
- Advancing collaboration across their supply-chains; and
- Tackling industry challenges head-on rather than “kicking the can down the road”.
To achieve these goals in the context of vehicle service engineering operations and quality it’s crucial to focus on collaboration, excellence, and focus to drive continuous improvement.
For clarity, service engineering operations within an automotive OEM involves designing, implementing and managing services around the vehicle’s life cycle, from design and production to after-sales support. That includes ensuring vehicle reliability, optimising maintenance procedures and providing technical support to customers and dealerships.
Essentially, it’s about applying engineering principles to enhance the entire service experience for the vehicle owner. Our objective is to bring service engineering operations and manufacturing quality closer together, driving three key deliverables:
- Proactive quality management and issue prevention: strengthening real-time quality monitoring in production to minimise defects at the source.
- Faster and more effective service engineering: improving diagnostics using tech-enabled service tools, remote solutions, and expanding over-the-air fixes to reduce repair times, along with dealer training to enhance technician competence.
- Customer-centric service excellence: using connected vehicle data to anticipate service needs and enhance customer satisfaction.
Based on the focus areas and priorities, leaders must sense-check whether their teams are acting fast enough to resolve quality concerns before they escalate. They must analyse whether they have real-time, accurate visibility into quality and service performance across the vehicle’s entire life cycle.
All leaders need to ask the hard questions of themselves and their teams: are our dealers and service teams fully equipped to diagnose and fix issues correctly the first time? This becomes increasingly important in the context of the growing complexity of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, advanced driver-assist systems, and connected systems. Technicians must be properly resourced to ensure they’re not overwhelmed, which would risk slowing down repairs, leading to higher warranty costs.
OEMs must empower their teams to evolve fast enough to handle the shift to EVs, software-defined vehicles and AI-driven diagnostics. We need to ensure we have the right talent, tools and infrastructure to stay ahead of increasing customer expectations.
It’s certainly true that these are daunting times for the automotive sector, but it’s also tremendously exciting. We have the opportunity to transform vehicle quality and service engineering into a proactive, data-driven powerhouse where problems are caught before they reach customers, repairs are faster and smarter, and teams collaborate seamlessly.
This has the potential to revolutionise service engineering by shifting from reactive to proactive quality and service engineering. Considerable time and effort go into troubleshooting issues, whether it’s concerns surfacing in the field, repeat repairs, or customer feedback. The opportunity is to flip that model and create a system where we predict, prevent, and solve problems before they impact customers.
Local OEMs can and should leverage their decades of institutional knowledge in the local market, and instructive and intimate understanding of the automotive market and what constitutes a sea-change or merely a tidal change.
We need to put our customers first, listening to their feedback, and integrate it into engineering decisions to improve future vehicle quality and customer service. We need to raise the bar on quality standards at every stage of design, manufacturing and service, ensuring our vehicles and service experience live up to Ford’s promise of durability and reliability.
If that sounds like a platitude, the reality is that for local OEMs to remain sustainable we must ensure that “good enough” isn’t acceptable and that we deliver excellence at every customer touchpoint.
Local OEMs can and should leverage their decades of institutional knowledge in the local market, and instructive and intimate understanding of the automotive market and what constitutes a sea-change or merely a tidal change. In the case of Ford Motor Company of SA that includes knowledge gleaned from more than a century of building Ford in here, starting with the Model Ts in 1924; the first Ford manufacturing operation in Africa.
That long-standing commitment is manifest in, for example, Ford’s local dealership network investment of almost R1bn over the next three years, on rightsizing facilities, optimising location, improving digital readiness, and upgrading after-sales infrastructure to better serve today’s tech-savvy, time-conscious customer. It’s a significant undertaking encompassing 118 facilities across SA, Botswana, Namibia and Eswatini, and in tune with changing global retail trends and designed to future-proof the brand, its dealer network and ultimately the customer experience.
A major driver of this investment is the understanding that there are interesting times ahead for OEMs, where leaders and their teams will be required to follow the adage “Focus on impact, not just effort.” It’s a deceptively simple principle that I wish I could teach my younger self: prioritise what truly moves the needle, whether it’s improving key performance indicators, accelerating issue resolution or enhancing the customer experience. Speak up and challenge inefficiencies. Just because something has “always been done a certain way” doesn’t mean it’s the best way.
Take ownership, even beyond your role. If something is broken, step up and fix it, regardless of whose responsibility it is. Balance speed with excellence. Sometimes perfect slows you down, but fast without quality creates bigger problems. It’s easy to get caught up in working hard, attending meetings and solving problems. But the real question is whether we are driving meaningful change and adding value. And, underpinning that: are our strategic decisions guided by data rather than “How we’ve always done things”?
The automotive sector has never been a haven for the faint-hearted, but local OEMs can and must leverage our legacy of a good reputation, a well-established dealer footprint and decades of experience in the local market. We must capitalise on our decades-long relationships with local customers, which present a powerful advantage over market newcomers.
Are we always excellent? No. Do we need to be? Of course. But excellence all the time — unless driven by data and systems — simply isn’t possible. Time to buckle up.
• Heunis is service engineering & operations director for Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa.
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