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mysupply at Maschinenbauforum

We were very pleased to be part of the MBF:MASCHINENBAUFORUM GmbH - Pforzheim! Inspired by the amazing presentations during the three days event, we want to share with you the major insights we got.

Tuesday, 10th of May

Risk management is total supplier management (TSM)

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Robert Dust, International Technology Transfer Management, bbw University of Applied Sciences

During his presentation, he explained the wide range of risk prevention and the secret wish of everyone in the procurement world - to have a crystal ball that shows a realistic overview of the supplier-purchaser situation. He proclaimed that this crystal ball now can be found under the name of Total Supplier Management - not only focusing on the Top 10 or 50 suppliers but looking on the topic differently:

A workflow-based cooperation model for the standardized, cross-divisional and process cost-optimized design and control of the entire partner network.

Procurement as a cornerstone of processes: trouble-free material flow and planning reliability

Alexander Bentele, Leiter Produktionsplanung, Liebherr Verzahntechnik GmbH and Dipl.-Math. Markus Günther, Produktmanager, Inform GmbH

We learned that missing parts are already a mutual drama between purchasing and production in normal times and have developed into an operational state of emergency in recent months. Nothing disrupts the process chain more than delays in delivery and the resulting additional expense.

Liebherr opted for dynamic demand planning well before the pandemic: Realistic deadlines are mirrored against the limited capacities, missing parts are visualized in an ordered network, countersigned, and made available overnight to the respective purchasers with appropriate comments. The benefits are real-time analyses, order-related escalations, and a reduction in downtimes due to missing parts, not to mention the reduction in effort on both sides of the interface.

The crisis in the crisis: survival strategies in the supply shortage, learnings and adjustments of the procurement strategy

Ernst Kranert, Einkaufsleiter, Wolf GmbH / Centrotec SE

Ernst Kranert reported on the experience of the “economic thriller” and several of the measures that helped to master the still existing exceptional situation. Above all the creation of more transparency, improvement of forecasting, material or product changes, alternatives in logistics and the overturning of fundamental philosophies in purchasing.

It seems like these shortages of raw materials and parts, drastic logistic problems, and incalculable waiting times for containers went on a collision course with run-down inventories, unprecedented demand, and the staggering high fringes of individual economies. Without any comparability to past events like the Eyjafjallajökull incident in Iceland and the Tsunami 2011 and their impact on the supply chain and transportation routes.

A price radar for all purchase parts

Fabian Steeg, Purchasing Manager, Atlas Copco IAS GmbH

Fabian Steeg explained that spare parts are still the biggest revenue generator in service, but the variety of parts on the market, sold online by manufacturers, distributors, independent service providers and pirates, leads to an unmanageable complexity in terms of products and prices. Purchasing decisions are often made "quick and dirty" because the manual effort required for price research is simply too high. They implemented an innovative solution called Markt-Pilot for sourcing spare parts with access to over 1500 qualified B2B Stores which helps them to tackle those issues.

Value analysis vs. material shortage

Sebastian Meindl, Geschäftsführer, Krehl & Partner

He gave a fresh look at the supply chain crisis by challenging companies to eliminate, substitute or reduce negative Value divers by changing materials or changing the function of the product. This could even lead to a new perspective on sustainability as well as a nice side effect.

He had some splendid examples of how to do that with different type of companies. Reach out to him if you want to learn more.

And the price of steel? Summary, development and “go green”

Andreas Schneider, Stahlmarkt Consult

One of the side effects of the COVID crisis was the drastic development of the steel price, which culminated by mid of 2021. Even though prices decreased in the meantime, they are still high above the price level in the past. As Andreas followed the steel price development for many years, he explained in detail the current and future price drivers. He also elaborated on the big disruption ahead on the way to produce “green” steel and future competitive production in Europe.

Procurement 4.0 – A victim of Corona?

A team of experts builds a Masterplan for the Digitalization of Procurement

Armin Maes, Leiter Strategischer Einkauf, Elexis AG und EMG Automation GmbH

He explained how they build up a blueprint to validate the potential for the digitalization of strategic and operative procurement processes and to derive concrete actions for its implementation. They build the cornerstone for the vision of Procurement 4.0, considering individual maturity levels and the global company strategy.

It is inspiring to see that companies, even when they are still confronted by daily challenges, they focus on the digitalization of redundant processes to have a mid-and long-term effect to become even more resilient for future challenges that can come.

Wednesday, 11th of May

To create the process of tomorrow – Fundamentals for the digital transformation

Angelika Bittner, Head of Analytics & Processes, SEW Eurodrive GmbH & Co. KG

The day started with a very insightful presentation speech with a following discussion about the global implementation of SAP Hana. That happened in the interplay of preserving the tried and tested and using the greenfield approach to create new processes from scratch to have a seamless end-to-end process including the changed management process in this ambitious project.

Process Mining as an instrument to optimize digital processes

Isabelle Terrier, Consultant operational excellence, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen

She explained that process mining itself is not a new concept. The capability of solutions providers is increasing massively in the last years, allowing to discover process deviations and loops as well as bottlenecks in a form of a landscape. This chance allows to increase the transparency, initiate targeted improvements, and use this instrument as a success criterion. She used incredible examples of use cases and explained – in case this technology is implemented in a serious and strategic manner – the benefits for the procurement function can be very promising.

Master Data management: The foundation of digitalization

Manuel Keilich, Head of IT SAP, Brückner Maschinenbau GmbH
Bernhard Wimmer, Head of digital projects supply chain, Brückner Maschinenbau GmbH


Brückner invested a lot of time for managing the master data. Why?
Because it is an extremely crucial part for Digitalization of Procurement. Some other companies, who were euphoric towards Digitalization discovered too late the importance of this process and were held up in their other ambitious digitalization initiatives.

They explained how they started the process in detail, what questions needed to be answered from various stakeholders and gave the audience at the same time a very insightful experience report and an action recommendation.

3D-Printing: From Hype to Reality – and as a alternative Source?

Chris Groger, Senior Manager Supply Chain Management, Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH

Additive manufacturing has experienced a hype in the last years – but the media coverage decreased lately. It was remarkably interesting to learn from Chris Groger’s experience with this topic, and about the (still) enormous potential of using plastics and metal for additive manufacturing. Certainly, this technology has (effectivity) limitations as well, but it became clear that there are huge savings potential to realize in the context of value management, and the development of new products or spare parts.

The supply chain act – and its realization in risk management

Simon Jähnig, Co-Founder, Integrity Next

Simon explained how the requirements and legal implications of the supply chain act must be faced by procurement organizations and the supporting role modern technology can take here.

The potentially significant impact the supply chain act has on procurement would be concretely to look at the supply chain holistically and consider human rights – in low-cost countries. The likelihood increases that existing supplier relations must be challenged or changed. This might also apply eventually for companies with a smaller employee number – only because customers are asking for that.

The future after the future – and what we can learn from unicorns…

Dr. Marcus Schüller, Senior Partner Operations, Roland Berger GmbH

It seems like there is no break coming soon for procurement practitioners, but Dr Marcus Schüller explained what companies in the “old economy” could learn from CPOs of Startups which gained a huge growth in a brief time: Unicorns

Procurement within successful startups demand a whole different working culture, with a strong influence of a high velocity of technical innovations and changes. That also implies for procurement for many other producing companies right now.

He citates Alejandro Basterrechea, Head of Procurement Excellence at Zalando as follows: “Procurement creates value-add across all growth phases of a start-up – and it needs to be adjusted accordingly”

We are grateful and inspired by this positive outlook.



Source: Maschinebauforum, Tagungs- und Seminarprogramm

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