Offenbacher maintains steady presence at Inteva Products

Troy, Mich. — Lon Offenbacher is the president and CEO of Inteva Products LLC, a Tier 1 automotive supplier with a global workforce surpassing 9,000 employees across more than 30 locations that stretch from Canada and Mexico to Germany and China.

As the company's top executive, Offenbacher has spent the last 12 years steering Inteva through macroeconomic and automotive industry-specific ups and downs ranging from the 2007-09 recession that devastated labor markets and the U.S. economy to the United Auto Workers' weekslong strike against General Motors Co. last year.

That strike rippled through the supply chain, rocking Inteva as well as others.

"It had an impact on us," Offenbacher said during an interview at Inteva's world headquarters in Troy. "GM is not our biggest customer, but they're a big customer to us, and they're an important customer."

It wasn't the first time in 2019 that GM shook up the business, however.

In response to the Detroit automaker's plans to end production at its Oshawa assembly plant in Canada, about 100 unionized workers at an Inteva facility in Whitby, Ontario, walked off the job last January, according to a report by Automotive News, a sister publication of Plastics News. Workers returned to the job site a day later.

"We've got a plant that is pretty much dedicated to a customer and then that customer decides, well, they're leaving," he said of Inteva's Oshawa operations. "I'd say that the machinations of our customers do affect us. … It's always painful, but we always try and reduce the amount of pain that is inflicted."

But Offenbacher's strategic maneuvering around these matters — some of which can be predicted, though others are often sudden and unexpected — is a reason among many that the executive has been named Plastics News' 2019 Automotive Newsmaker of the Year.

Inteva's formation, in a way, leans on the cliché of a phoenix rising from the ashes. It was formed in 2008 as a spinoff from Delphi Corp., the former parts unit of GM that emerged from a four-year bankruptcy in 2009 as a much smaller version of its earlier giant self. But unlike the parent company, independent Inteva hasn't yet tumbled with the turmoil.

The company boasts worldwide sales of $2.8 billion and is No. 77 among the top 100 global suppliers, according to the 2019 ranking by AN. Inteva is listed at No. 30 on PN's most recent ranking of North American injection molders. The company's 2018 sales, for injection molding specifically, were $305 million, according to PN estimates.

"You have to operate lean and efficient," Offenbacher, 66, said of his approach to the business.

Unlike GM, which at one point was considered the world's largest employer, Offenbacher isn't interested in positioning Inteva to be one of the biggest.

"I don't know if that gave [GM] any strategic advantage — just being big," he said.

For Inteva, Offenbacher places more value on being agile and innovative, and in building trust with customers, which in turn has led to more business, he said.

"We've never failed a customer and because of that reputation we've had a number of programs come our way where somebody else did fail," he added.

Before being appointed to lead Inteva, Offenbacher was the business line executive for the integrated closure and cockpit and interior systems business lines for Delphi. But his professional relationship with the automotive industry — and GM, specifically — started in 1971 with the former Inland Division of GM as part of the cooperative education program at Purdue University.

Offenbacher, a native of Dayton, Ohio, continued to work for the division upon graduation, holding several positions in engineering, operations and sales. In 1985 — now with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a master's in business administration in both back pockets — he was promoted to sales manager and transferred to Troy, Mich., where he established a sales office for Inland.

"We've carried some of the things that I learned as a young engineer and that General Motors and Delphi emphasized — things like lean manufacturing, building productivity," he explained. "There were some good foundational lessons, and I find that that training and that experience that came from those roots is very positive."

But Offenbacher also left certain attributes behind: "Bureaucracy and multiple layers in the organization," he said.

With Inteva, Offenbacher tries to operate it as a flat organization, so communication can happen more rapidly. Other essentials to running the business, he said, include being aware of any headwinds but staying the course.

"You have to be aware of that, but you also have to plow forward and be aggressive in pursuing new business, pursuing new technology and keeping your team together because fundamental to our success is our culture and that we walk the talk," Offenbacher explained. "When I say something, my team is allowed to disagree with me. But when we leave the room, we go out with a united voice and spread that through the organization."

And Offenbacher attributes that culture to the company's success, adding that he also applies some of the Boy Scout virtues he learned from when he was a kid.

"Honesty, integrity and treating each other well, safety — those are foundations," he said. "And if you live that, and if you actually don't just preach it, but demonstrate it in the way you perform, people will get it."

Suppliers like Inteva also need to pivot when customers, especially the large OEMs, head in new directions. As automakers — GM, Ford and Volkswagen, for example — invest billions of dollars in electrification and concepts of future mobility, Offenbacher sees an opportunity for Inteva's product mix to evolve as well. Whether it's for autonomous, electric or yet-to-be-developed vehicles, if they're carrying occupants, then they're still going to have interiors and doors, he said.

Inteva focuses on three product areas for automotive. For closure systems, Inteva makes door modules, lightweight window regulators, integrated door systems with electronic features, door and compartment latches, and actuators for the quiet movement of vehicle doors, glove boxes, folding mirrors and more. Inteva's interior systems encompass everything from instrument panels and headliners to its trademarked, leatherlike Inteather material and various stitching techniques.

The company also designs, engineers and manufactures motors and electronics to support window lift systems, seats, roof systems, glove boxes and other aspects of the vehicle.

"If anything, over the last 10 years, the interiors market has been burgeoning with lots of changes, lots of advancements in the use of materials, more exotic materials and the integration of electronics and ambient lighting. … That plays extremely well for our portfolio of products," Offenbacher said of the shift in auto interiors, where creature comforts are a bigger priority.

"Now the headwinds against that are all the customers going through fundamental changes, so in some cases they're emphasizing cost control and cost reduction more aggressively than in the past," he explained.

But, in the automotive industry, suppliers especially have always been confronted with cost reduction and trying to do more with less.

"It's in our DNA," Offenbacher said.

Within Inteva's motors and electronics segment, the company is looking at opportunities in motion or gesture control. It is also pursuing more opportunities in the materials science realm, as plastics, leather, chrome, wood and other exotic materials are being used to answer consumer needs for comfort, convenience and durability.

"It kind of all fits together," said Offenbacher, who keeps his eyes and ears open for acquisitions and alliances that complement and improve Inteva's offerings.

"I'm actually very buoyant and very excited about the future for the technology side and the product side," he said. "And what comes next for us beyond organic growth is we're always looking at acquisitions and the opportunity to bring in something where we have some adjacency, where it's not completely foreign, but something that makes sense to us."