Brings 30 years of automotive industry experience
Pretoria – July, 3rd 2008 – Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa (FMCSA) announced the appointment of Peter Lawson to the newly-created position of vice president of Operations, effective immediately. He will report directly to Hal Feder, president and CEO of FMCSA. Lawson is currently vice president of Manufacturing at Ford of Australia, where he has served for the past four years.
In his new role, Lawson will take over the responsibilities of Trevor Kok, Vice President of Manufacturing and Supply, covering vehicle and engine assembly operations, product development, purchasing, TVM and quality.
Kok, who has worked with Ford Motor Company for nearly 40 years, has elected to retire from full-time service later this year. He will continue to serve as a strategic consultant to the FMCSA business as a key liaison with the South African government.
“After almost 40 years of dedicated and invaluable service with FMCSA, Trevor has decided to retire from a full-time role,” said Feder. “After transitioning his responsibilities to Peter, Trevor will continue on in a consultancy role, where his relationships with both local and national governments will be instrumental to keeping our investment and expansion plans on course.”
“Peter’s hands-on approach and valuable experience at all levels of the organisation will be critical to supporting the expansion of our operations that are currently underway,” explained Feder. “Trevor will help transition all of the great work he’s been instrumental in helping achieve to date, which has successfully prepared us for an expanded export programme of our next generation global compact pickup and Puma engines in 2011.”
Lawson has 30 years of experience in the automotive industry. During his early years at Ford, he worked on a number of new model launches as Process Engineer and Launch Coordinator. Lawson quickly rose through the ranks, and in 1986 he spent 12 months at the Robot Centre in Dearborn as the Ford Asia Pacific Liaison Engineer.
This lead to management positions in various functions, including Maintenance, Manufacturing Engineering, New Model Launches, Production Area Management, Lean Manufacturing and Stamping Operations. During these assignments he played a key role in various New Model launches.
In 2000, Lawson was assigned to Dearborn as Ford Production Systems Director before becoming Chicago Assembly Plant Manager in 2002. In 2004, he returned to Ford Australia as vice president of Manufacturing.
Lawson received a Bachelor of Science with a major in Physics at Flinders University in South Australia. He also successfully completed Ford’s Graduate Program. Lawson is married with two sons.
