Henniges growing around sustainability, automation trends

AUBURN HILLS, Mich.—When it comes to your biggest expectations, Henniges Automotive Holdings Inc. may just surprise you and surpass them.

That's the goal anyway.

Because Henniges is committing to bigger goals of its own, those built around customer satisfaction, product performance, sustainability and production.

Yes, Henniges is in an enviable space—that Goldilocks zone where its products transition from ICE to EVs with ease. But that doesn't mean it's smooth sailing ahead. As a maker of sealing products that suit both platforms (and everything in between), the company is facing new challenges, particularly around sustainability, design and manufacturing.

Because OEMs are demanding more from their suppliers as they work to achieve sustainability aims of their own. And in the sealing space, that means focusing heavily on aerodynamics and lightweighting.

Favorable aerodynamic performance is drawing many auto makers to flush-glass designs—those where you're sealing glass to glass with no structure in between.

"When we talk about the frameless design and when we talk about a flush-glass design, these are complicated door architectures that our customers have adopted where they remove a lot of structure from the door to remove weight," Fred Jamieson, global vice president of engineering and program management, told Rubber News. "(It) is a frameless system that we have seen on convertibles and things like that in the past, but it has really just taken off."

The trend started with one of the leaders in the BEV space who was looking to reduce drag and extend range in the process. As more OEMs brought EV models into the market, they followed the lead. And as it happened, Henniges was there with the know-how to make it all work.

"It is a much more complicated system to seal," Jamieson said. "(There are) a lot more failure modes, a lot more ways for this thing to leak and let noise in. And what we found is we are ahead of our competitors when it comes to this design."

In the end, it really does boil down to design, he said—to the vision that the auto maker has for the vehicle and the performance expectations that come with it.

"I think the secret sauce is the sealing know-how (Henniges has), it is the design," Jamieson said, noting that Henniges' partnerships with leading EV makers in both North America and China have helped it thrive in this space. "… A lot of it does come down to design experience and lessons learned."

Yes, experience is among Henniges' strengths, but it only takes you so far. Because in the end, Jamieson said, collaboration will take the product where it needs to go.

"As you are getting into development," Jamieson said, "you really have to work with your customers through that development, because a lot of the secret sauce is really what does your customer want? As they are developing it, there are subtle changes—there are things that we have to be aware of as they are building through their development phase. … So it is really specific to each customer and how they are coming along."

It also helps that, for a global company, Henniges is fairly tight-knit.

Engineers and R&D centers across the globe routinely and effectively communicate to ensure that the biggest ideas and best practices are implemented companywide, according to Deepak Manchanda, global vice president of sales and the Europe region.

"The rate of change as you see it today in China is unbelievable. We have products that we supply in China that are there because the customers are pushing the boundaries of design or sustainability. It is driving a lot of innovation," Manchanda said. "… That experience that our development team in China is going through at a pace brings a lot of unique ability for us when some of that gets propagated across the globe."

Henniges is agile in its product development in part because it has the right tools at its disposal. And simulation is among the most critical tools because it allows Henniges to take an idea, test it and tweak it to ensure the best possible performance for customers.

And it can do all of that in the shortest amount of time possible.

"It used to be a standard (product development time) would have been 24 months, now we are down to 18, and they are trying to get down to 12," Jamieson said. "As you accelerate this development process, it is really becoming more important for you to drive a lot of this development virtually.

"You are no longer waiting for prototypes, you are no longer investing in these tools to try the parts out to try to figure it out. You are doing it all in a system in a CAD environment."

Hitch up that innovation and simulation with streamlined global communication and an all-in automation approach and you end up with an agile company that can meet the needs of any customer, according to Chief Operating Officer Larry Rollins.

Look at Henniges' operations today, he said, and you'll find an extremely agile, well-automated series of plants.

Henniges always has had its sights set on efficiency, and automation plays a major role in helping it to remain agile and meet customer demands amid the ebbs and flows of the industry. It was a lesson borne out of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent labor shortages.

"When you look at automation, there is a lot of little automation and there is a lot of big automation, but when you add it all up together it allows us to meet our customers needs without the dependency on people all the time," Rollins said. "It gives the customer a lot bigger comfort feeling, too. Because these are things they, themselves, experienced. They were not able to get enough people."

When it became clear that automation was needed in the plants, the Henniges leadership team didn't hesitate to make the investments that brought greater automation to its facilities.

"We met with our board of directors and we talked about our automation plan," Rollins said. "We set up teams in all three regions (North America, Europe and China) and we got very focused on, internally, optimizing what we were doing from an automation standpoint, by accelerating the pace at which we put it in."

And when the decision to make the investment was made, Rollins said, the company moved quickly, exceeding its five-year plan within a much shorter time frame.

What makes Henniges' plan unique, Rollins said, is that it focused on every area of the globe, creating a seamlessly networked series of manufacturing plans that quickly bring customers' products to market.

And that, he said, is another reason Henniges is routinely meeting and exceeding customer expectations.