Consulting and coaching

Initial situation: Is your company at the beginning or in the middle of standardisation or modularisation measures or would you like to address the topic of variant management? In order to make the best possible use of scarce resources in development, we work with you to identify your greatest potential and evaluate your current approaches against best practice approaches from our network.

Procedure: Based on interviews, we analyse the current procedures and approaches in your company. Supplementary initial data analyses provide additional transparency about the effects of complexity on your company. Once we have been able to determine your status quo with the help of the interviews and the data, we compare this with successful approaches from our experience and our network. Finally, we discuss together how the identified gaps can be closed in the best possible way and which specific measures provide the best balance of benefit and effort for your individual situation.

Result: At the end of the project, you will receive an assessment of your status quo in comparison to other manufacturing companies. You will also receive an overview of promising measures and projects whose potential has been assessed from the perspective of your situation.

Initial situation: Would you like to implement innovation or complexity management projects? Then we will be happy to provide you with advice and support. Coaching often follows an initial status quo assessment and serves to implement and realise the potential identified.

Procedure: The intensity of a coaching session can be customised to your individual situation. The spectrum ranges from sporadic coordination to safeguard the next steps, checking and validating the results achieved or jointly selecting the right methods to intensive support for workshops, joint project management and training in theoretical principles. The aim of our coaching approaches is always to enable the specialists in your company to manage innovation and complexity more successfully. This enables you to build up targeted expertise and drive forward important projects at the same time. 

Result: At the end of a successful coaching programme, you will have successfully developed concepts, implemented projects or trained specialists.

Initial situation: Diverse and individual customer requirements have led to a broad product range and countless variants. In many areas of the company, your employees' capacities are eaten up by the maintenance of existing products, leaving little time for innovation. If you feel the same way, systematic complexity management, e.g. in the form of a modular concept, can help.

Procedure: The starting point for the development of a modular concept is always an analysis of market and customer requirements so that the modular concept is not developed without taking the market into account. In addition, the product and process structure must be analysed in order to define the requirements and boundary conditions for a modular concept together with the market perspective. By comparing the diversity required by the market and the diversity that can be realised internally with reasonable effort, it is possible to derive constituent features, standards and planned module diversity. This ultimately allows the architecture of the modular concept to be defined and a configuration logic to be determined.

Result: The result is a modular concept that takes into account the external market perspective and the internal product and process perspective and enables a market-orientated product portfolio with reduced complexity in the business processes. The concept also includes module profiles that can be used as specifications for the development of the modular system modules.

Initial situation: The number of variants in your company has grown historically and there are now a large number of variants that are no longer needed or are only needed very rarely. However, your product management still finds it difficult to discontinue these variants. Systematic variant management is therefore required that systematically addresses the creation of variants, the monitoring of variants and, finally, their discontinuation.

Procedure: Together with you, we identify the appropriate decision criteria for the introduction and discontinuation of your variants. Based on your available data, we can then analyse which variants should be discontinued based on these decision criteria. This information can be prepared in a dashboard that provides decision-makers with all the important information at a glance. We also support you in establishing processes to continuously manage the variety of variants and make data-based decisions.

Result: In addition to an initial data-based variant cancellation, you establish processes for the systematic management of your variant diversity and can thus better control it in future.