Customer Program Management

Overview:

The Customer Program Manager leads the cross-functional team to develop and launch product and services

Activities:

Responsible for development and launch of a compelling product that meets internal/external customer requirements and promotes customer satisfaction.

To deliver the product in accordance with development milestones into stable production and to meet operating profit over program life. 

Specifics:

• Manage customer interface and direct customer communication strategy with Japan OEMs. Ensure assignments from Japan OEMs are well understood, distributed to core teams, and reasonable for Harman success.
• Build and manage customer relationships.
• Work with customer interface teams to manage issues.
• Represent product engineering team in new business opportunities by interfacing with core team /customer / sales. Drive business case inputs and product engineering engagement on new technologies.
• Build and maintain a customer interface team – responsible to manage the customer from the entry-level to the senior-level. Evaluate and develop team members.
• Serve as internal expert on Japan OEM development processes.
• Analyze and negotiate program schedules with internal and external stakeholders.
• Ensure product costing targets are achieved for each product. Maintain records of BOM costs compared to targets; escalate within Harman when targets are not achieved. Ensure design actions are implemented to recover any cost variance in BOM cost target.
• Ensure adherence to engineering best practices / processes and facilitate creation of new best practices as appropriate.
• Own and maintain the resource budget and cost of external resources.
• Ensure engineering teams have equipment and facilities needed to meet customer requirements. This includes budget as well as acquisition.
• Back up engineering colleagues in Japan Office and program management team as appropriate.
• Oversee decisions regarding product content, budget and timing to ensure the product is on-time, on-schedule, on-quality, and meets all customer acceptance criteria (Performance and Features).
• Manage product risk proactively, identify engineering risks and coordinate meetings with the PM and multi-discipline functions to address risks before they become issues.
• Evaluate engineering processes and metrics to track and measure engineering success. Update processes where needed to address customer-specific requirements. Ensure all engineering disciplines are designing per Harman processes and customer processes.
• Ensure customer requirements are communicated throughout Harman engineering teams. Ensure customer requirements are met with the product designed. Manage customer interface teams to clarify requirements when needed.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science in a technical field or equivalent experience.
• Minimum 5 years product development and/or program management experience with specific experience in at least one area of technical specialization, such as: software, hardware, telematics or electronic manufacturing, preferably in an automotive application.
• Developed and launched at least 1 product through the lifecycle from business commitment through stable production.
• Expected general skills includes, but not limited to, cross functional team leadership, arbitrate technical tradeoffs, problem solving, negotiation, P&L understanding and communication skills
• Fluent in English and Japanese (written and verbal)
   
• What Is Nice To Have
   
  • Masters of Science, Technical or MBA
  • PMP Certification
  • Automotive supplier, Tier1 Electronics background
  • Direct experience with applicable customer