Professional Growth to Global Manufacturing Engineering Manager in SMT | Guido Heuser

Thirty years. Nokia. Flex. Vario Systems. HARMAN Automotive. And a career that started on the line as an operator.
Guido Heuser doesn’t talk about manufacturing from a boardroom, he talks about it from the shop floor up. As Manager of Global Advanced Manufacturing Engineering at HARMAN Automotive, he oversees quality, OEE, and process standards across factories on multiple continents. And he has some hard-earned things to say about where AI fits in and where human judgment still has to lead.

In this episode, Guido walks us through the real tension between quality and cycle time (and how data-driven insights can actually resolve it), how to make global standards stick across cultures without imposing them top-down, and why the next generation of engineers should start from scratch — on purpose.
He’s also refreshingly direct about AI: fully open to it, genuinely excited, and absolutely clear that curiosity and critical thinking must remain at the center of how we innovate.
You’ll hear:

• How HARMAN prevents quality escapes before they become field issues
• Why ownership beats enforcement when rolling out global standards
• What US and German manufacturing cultures can learn from each other
• The AI stance every experienced practitioner should have right now
• Career advice that compounds slowly — and pays off for decades