In business, success has many fathers. In other words, there are many buttons that can be pressed in a business to be successful. This is not just in terms of processes, but also the people, the technical infrastructure, IT, management systems, even how you deal with clients and suppliers. Only when all of these factors work in harmony does everything function as a whole.
It’s a complex, interwoven network of influencing factors, and to do justice to this, ever since our early days, we’ve always taken a holistic approach to things, building on each constituent part. In practical terms, this has meant we’ve had to work on specific areas within a project, while always referring to the other constituent parts. We had to know what impact these other parts would have on the specific topic we were looking at and include that in the consultation. So “holistic” also means that – in addition to developing or planning projects – we also implement them. Around 95% of our projects involve implementation, so we don’t just help the company with the planning, we also deliver the project. The advantage with this for clients is that they can count on us to stay highly committed. For us, the advantage is that we can gather more experience on each project, especially during implementation and this can then flow back into new projects during the earlier planning stage, which is ultimately also of benefit to the customer.
Neckar-Alb is shaped by the highly innovative medium-sized companies in the area that operate on an international level. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t survive in their sectors of industry, which have high demands. Being innovative is not just about products but also about processes. In international competition, it’s not enough for products by themselves to be good, they have to be produced efficiently and distributed worldwide through efficient supply chains.
For us, being a partner to industry means that we have to stay completely up to speed with the latest developments in terms of professional skills and methods. We also have to develop solutions which don’t yet exist in the way they are actually needed. Being innovative is thus the key to our success. Even if the region of Neckar-Alb is a strong growth area, we can’t afford to rely solely on this area in physical terms, since lots of companies are now global. So we’re now also working for several customers on an international level. This adheres to the philosophy of thinking locally, but acting globally.
Developments in product development, production, and logistics have varied quite a bit over the course of the last ten years. There has been major progress in product development in terms of applying methods to the optimization of processes. Methods in the field of quality management and lean management have increasingly made inroads into our projects and the work of developers and designers has become more efficient. We noticed with our projects in these areas that the concept of customer requirements is becoming more and more prevalent. At the same time, the markets have come up to speed, and products and services have to be developed in shorter and shorter cycles. They also have to be an exact match with the requirements of the customer in shorter time to market. This can no longer be accounted for profitably in the development process without strict application of methods, so we’ve done some intensive, yet very successful work with some clients in this area.
In the area of production, demand was and still is strong for applying lean management and six sigma philosophies. We were able to provide plenty of good input in such projects based on our holistic approaches – and still can today – as the requirements of our customers have turned more and more in recent years toward the sustainability of implemented measures.
In the area of logistics, we’re currently experiencing a huge surge in inquiries relating to the optimization, planning and implementation of warehousing facilities. These range from process optimization to the construction of new facilities, with everything in between. One trend at the moment is the application of lean management and six sigma philosophies in warehouses, an area offering significant potential to leverage improvements. We’ve been a bit of a trendsetter in terms of lean warehousing, which enabled us to capture the imagination of a wider audience in 2008. We’ve now specialized even further in this area and are currently working more closely on topics like shop floor management. We’ve also been able to adhere to our holistic approach in this area. As Aristotle said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Since many medium-sized enterprises serve clients of all sizes, including large organizations, we also have to know and understand the business environment of those companies. As a result, we also work with big companies, from Hamburg in the north to Munich in the south. Through our projects we’re exposed to the language of our customers, and their suppliers, and this feeds back into project know-how, spanning all parts of the process chain. It also equips us to plan and implement projects more holistically.
One fundamental challenge we face stems from the fact that the methods of lean managements and six sigma are more geared to highvolume serial production and are not necessarily a good fit with medium-sized enterprises. Nevertheless, to still be positioned to derive benefit from these methods, they have to be adapted to the many application scenarios faced by SMEs. This is a challenge for us, but one we’re excited to take on as it’s actually quite fun continually overhauling systems and adapting to the specific requirements of the customer.
So there’s never a dull moment as each project has its own idiosyncrasies which can suddenly become a new or different kind of challenge! We see ourselves as a production line for expert advice, but nothing is off the shelf. Everything revolves around the problem of the client so each solution is customized, even if it’s based on tried-and-tested methods.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Augustin
Steinbeis Transfer Center Process Management in Product Development, Production and Logistics (Gomaringen)
su0632@stw.de