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OUR STUDIES, WHITE PAPERS AND INDUSTRY PAPERS
White Paper: Go GREEN 2022
COMPETITIVENESS AND FUTURE ASSURANCE
Heat records, forest fires, dried-up rivers and lakes — climate change caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can no longer be ignored. In Germany, industry is responsible for around one-fifth of GHG emissions. According to the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, two-thirds of these emissions are generated during energy production, while one-third is released during the manufacture of products in the metal and chemical industries, for example.
While such process-related emissions – methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases in addition to carbon dioxide (CO2) – are mostly unavoidable, the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and heat can very well be reduced or even completely avoided. This is the reason why the German government is pushing for the conversion to a climate-neutral industrialized country – across the entire value chain.
White Paper: Strategy Excellence
How to make the future happen
The question currently arises as to why the topic of strategy is just now gaining renewed attention among many companies. In our opinion, this is due to two developments: First, external influences such as political decisions or shorter technology cycles on companies and their market environment have significantly increased in strength and speed in recent years. As a result, the added value that companies create for their customers is coming under much more rapid and sustained pressure than it was a few years ago. Second, many companies are increasingly struggling to implement strategic initiatives. According to recent studies, the rate of ineffective strategic initiatives is around 50%. This represents a waste of resources that companies can no longer afford.
For companies, it follows from these two developments that they must implement excellent strategy development and deployment processes to ensure their long-term success in the marketplace.
Industry paper: Food
Apart from the large retail chains, the food sector in Germany is generally characterized by numerous small and medium-sized companies. Most of them have no experience with lean management to date. Producing small batches, delivering just-in-time and responding flexibly to customer wishes is therefore difficult for them to imagine.
Currently, the food industry is dominated by overproduction and excessive inventories. And that has a number of negative effects.
Study: Green Transformation in Mechanical and Plant Engineering
In mechanical engineering, experts currently see three megatrends, which must be combined at companies. Sustainability, digitalization, and systems engineering. According to expert opinions, in order to be able to guarantee comprehensive sustainability, mechanical engineering must work symbiotically with its customers. It is only possible to tackle systematic tasks such as the circular economy by uniting system builders and operators.
So that the green transformation succeeds, companies and their suppliers must cooperate more closely and increase their readiness for transformation. As the results of the study show, it’s likely that not all companies will succeed.
Industry Paper: Private Equity
FINANCIAL INVESTMENTS ARE IN DEMAND – NOW MORE THAN EVER.
When it comes to analyzing a company’s numbers, financial investors are unreservedly among the professionals. But that doesn’t mean they also have a profound understanding of what is happening on the factory floor. The opinion of the companies surveyed in this private equity study clearly shows: financial investors are valued for their important role and are readily chosen as partners.
When it comes to analyzing a company’s numbers, financial investors are unreservedly among the professionals. But that doesn’t mean they also have a profound understanding of what is happening on the factory floor. The opinion of the companies surveyed in this private equity study clearly shows: financial investors are valued for their important role and are readily chosen as partners.
Study: Companies in Change
Change Readiness Index 2022
The German economy is under continuing pressure to transform. Yet, the current Change Readiness Index shows that companies have only been able to increase their ability to change slightly in recent years, despite turbulent times. Many measures that had to be implemented at speed during the COVID-19 pandemic have so far quite obviously had no deep impact.
Processes, structures, employee qualifications, leadership and corporate culture – everything that has shaped companies to date continues to be put to the test. If companies want to emerge successfully from the transformation, they must look beyond acute challenges and work intensively on their ability to change
Study: Green Transformation 2021
There’s no more hesitating when it comes to the green transformation – a harsh realization the industry has had to come to terms with. Companies like to believe they’re at an advantage over other industries. Yet, despite their marked success, the following still remains true: the automotive industry is not going to evolve into an exemplary green industry overnight. It’s a long – and, to a degree, also very arduous – process. However, increasingly stringent requirements and growing societal pressure have set a process in motion that is gradually but surely accelerating.
The path to emission- and CO2-free production will require the industry to reflect on their core strengths: an engineering spirit, courage, and commitment.
White paper: Process Automation 2021
HOW COMPANIES ARE REALIZING THE BENEFITS OF DIGITIZATION
For companies, the focus of most digitization measures is on performance. Modern digital technologies for process automation help achieve this goal.
Increasing efficiency, achieving greater transparency and reducing costs – according to the Industry 4.0 Index surveyed by Staufen AG, the majority of companies primarily pursue these three goals with digitization. The means to achieve this are modern technologies that focus on simple implementation and application.
Study: Restructuring 2021
The Road to Success is a constant Construction Site
The spectrum of challenges to be mastered at the same time ranges from digitalization and corporate and leadership culture to cost and financing issues. Predictive restructuring is the key to ensuring that these factors that impact the success of a company do not turn into major construction sites that have to be managed simultaneously.
In essence, it is about establishing a clear process that holistically puts the future viability of their own company to the test. And to do so when there are no clearly visible cracks.
Study: Collaboration 2021
In our “Collaboration” study, we delved deeper into collaboration as a factor for success: We were curious about how companies organize collaboration in difficult times to stay on track. In cooperation with Valuestreamer, we surveyed 326 German companies in spring 2021. For international cross-comparison, companies from China, Brazil and Central Eastern Europe also participated in the survey.
White paper: Variant and complexity management
Digitalization and globalization are intensifying competition and putting medium-sized and manufacturing companies in particular under great pressure. In addition, new competitors are entering the market and causing difficulties for even established players. Many companies are trying to attract existing customers and new customers through an ever-expanding product range. Furthermore, possibilities for individualization and customization create an almost “infinite variety” of offers. But also the internal drive of development engineers to create ever better, more efficient technical solutions leads to new variants on the component side. As a result, complexity is increasing throughout the company, which is reflected in ever complex processes along the entire value chain. The supposed advantages on the market side – in particular increased sales – are increasingly being eroded by rising production costs.
White paper: Leadership Excellence
In times of fast and even disruptive change, an organization’s ability to adapt is an absolute success factor. Strategies, structures and processes form the basis for managing change. But without effective leadership and a corporate culture that embraces a pioneering spirit and individual responsibility, nobody can look to the future with confidence. Along with the development and qualification of employees, leadership and culture form the inner program with which an organization can face change.Those who create a shared vision, build a trustful team spirit, establish communication channels and know the employees including their strengths and weaknesses, will handle tomorrow s challenges well.
White paper: Supply Chain Network Management
Measures for optimization are mostly concentrated on internal processes. In contrast, the company’s own value-added network of increasingly numerous partners is far too rarely in focus. This is a mistake, because in crisis situations it becomes clear that numerous companies have to reconfigure their supply chain. We think holistically: classic supply chain management becomes supply chain network management.
White paper: Agile Companies
Studies show that only about 10 percent of companies are able to profitably grow over a longer period of time.1 One of the reasons for this is the increase in complexity due to the penetration of new markets, in addition to the constant drive for product innovation and development of new customer potential. As a result, companies often focus on their internal processes and establish administrative structures, on the one hand to organize this complexity in the corporate environment, and on the other hand to “put things in order” internally. This order often turns into bureaucracy – and bureaucracy can be crippling. Companies as a result gradually lose their original founder’s mentality that originally led them to success. Establishing organizational structures sometimes has exactly the opposite effect of what was originally intended: Internal structures can no longer cope with external complexity and are not primarily oriented towards the value creation process; they develop their own logic (“silo thinking”) and complexity.
Study: Success in Change
In companies, structure, processes, management and corporate culture as well as employees and their qualifications must adapt towards change, only then can technological solutions promise success. The study “Success in Change – Hungary” shows that there is still room for improvement in these areas in the Hungarian economy. Companies are not yet ready for rapid changes.
Study: Best Strategy 2020
What is the secret to long-term corporate success?
We have decoded the DNA of the model companies and our analysis has identified recurring parameters in these top enterprises. They can be bundled together to form the 7 characteristics of the world market leaders.
White Paper: Predictive Restructuring 2020
Looking back from today’s perspective, the banking crisis of 2008/2009 was harmless. What’s more: After that crisis, the only way for the German economy was up. Yet, towards the end of the boom phase, we were already seeing an increase in crisis symptoms. The huge emerging trends digitalization, e-mobility and sustainabilitywere setting the stage in many market segments for impending up heaval – a risk cocktail was being whipped up.
Study: Fokus on the workplace 2020
Of the satisfied employees, 66% stated that nice colleagues were responsible for liking their job. 63% noted interesting tasks, and almost 50% said it was due to a good salary. Only 23% of employees attributed their satisfaction to good leaders. Accordingly, only about one in five employees fully considers their supervisor as part of the team. The rest still feel they are partially or even exclusively being led by a traditional boss, who remains distant to the team.
Study: Digitalization 2020
A study from Staufen AG and Staufen Digital Neonex GmbH
For more than two decades, digitalization has been influencing our society, making everyday life much easier, speeding up our economy, and enabling new business models and sources of profit. Nevertheless, the power of persistence was previously much greater than the need to introduce long overdue change – precisely in processing industry….
International Study: Reset after the Shutdown 2020
Measures introduced around the world to contain the Covid-19 pandemic are developing into a long-term stress test for the industry. 56 percent of companies assume that they will not be able to resume work like before the shutdown until the end of the year at the earliest, or even over the course of next year. According to the current study “New start after the 2020 shutdown,” however, seven percent of companies fear they will not be able to hold out that long. Management consultancy Staufen interviewed more than 730 companies in April for the study. Participants came from Germany, USA, China, Brazil, Mexico, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania.
Study: Green Transformation in the automobile industry 2020
The potential for ecologically sustainable management has yet to be exhausted in the automotive industry Nine out of ten companies still have some catching up to do in this regard, as is clearly shown in the recent study “Green Transformation in the Automotive Industry”. To find out, the automotive experts at the management consultancy Staufen surveyed more than 250 OEMs and suppliers from the automotive industry in Germany.
White paper: Order fulfillment in mechanical engineering 2018
The mechanical and plant engineering industry in Germany is facing major changes. The focus is no longer on the product as a masterpiece of German engineering, but on complete product/service packages. What is needed are solution providers who know their customers’ needs and processes inside out and offer them tailor-made solutions.
White paper: Lean Leadership 2016
It has been a few years since the first projects to introduce Shop Floor Management were implemented, and over the course of these years we have executed numerous success-ful implementation projects with our customers and BestPractice partners. As a result of introducing Shop Floor Management, many managers have come a long way. Daily Shop Floor Management is now being actively implemented by these managers, who lead in accordance with the defined tools: they ask open-ended questions, enable employees and offer them support.Noch mehr wissenswertes
Podcast
In times of rapid, sometimes even disruptive change, an organization’s ability to adapt and change is the success factor par excellence. Without a finely tuned culture of change that promotes a pioneering spirit and personal responsibility, it will not be possible to successfully anticipate future developments. In our podcast, business leaders and innovators discuss the challenges ahead as well as new ways and opportunities to flexibly adapt to them.
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