Studies & White Papers

improving END-TO-END PERFORMANCE

The “Shaping the Future 2025” study by Staufen USA offers insights into how U.S. industrial companies are transforming through innovation and digital technologies.
For this study, a total of 280 industrial companies in the USA were surveyed in November 2024. The extra chapter in the “Shaping the Future 2025” study provides a comparison between the ASG region (Austria, Switzerland, and Germany) and the USA.

Learning is the ultimate game-changer in today’s world and a critical competitive advantage for organizations. Learning empowers individuals and organizations to innovate and grow. It also fosters the ability to proactively manage constant change and use megatrends as an opportunity to shape the future. We support you in this! 

Successful companies are future-oriented and anticipate major upheavals of tomorrow. With our magazine, we offer orientation and show how companies can overcome the challenges of widely diversified supply chains or the establishment of sustainable processes.

How managers, those responsible for personnel development, and employees work together to ensure effective training and development

The Staufen 2023 study “The Future of Training” reveals that employees, managers, and those responsible for professional development must work together to design a continuous learning process and advance further training and development effectively. 

GROW. PERFORM. TRANSFORM to peak performance

In today’s competitive environment, continuous learning and training have become essential for personal and professional development. Our white paper examines the importance of developing skills and how training programs can help people reach their full potential while helping the company remain ready for the future.

THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF COMPETITIVENESS

Becoming digital, efficient, sustainable, and resilient all at once is a major challenge for many companies today.

However, the Staufen “Future Industry” study shows that boards and management teams in industry have clearly set their strategic compass. The foundation for a sustainable, change-ready and resilient business is and will remain operational and digital excellence. When set up in this way, a multi-faceted challenge for a company can become a multi-faceted opportunity.

BOOSTING ROBUSTNESS, RESILIENCE AND RESPONSIVENESS

What does the stable supply chain network of tomorrow look like? Those who come out on top will be supply chain networks that at their core have three capabilities: Robustness, responsiveness and resilience.

All reconfiguration measures are geared towards strengthening these three capabilities. Companies then benefit from the fact that a robust network has suitable measures in place to protect them against events with a lower severity and enables continuous operation. The more responsive the network is, the quicker the company is capable of making suitable adjustments and to continue with the performance. 

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.

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.

Staufen AG has compiled the German Industry 4.0 Index every year since 2014. Thus, the metric is nearly as old as the term Industry 4.0 itself. The 2022 index indicates that the German economy is threatening to split down the middle. 2, the German Industry 4.0 Index was compiled as part of the study “Companies in Transformation.”

For this, we surveyed a total of 363 companies in Germany in the fall of 2021, a good two-thirds of whom are from the mechanical and plant engineering industry, the electrical industry, and the automotive sector.

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.

Quelle: Tagesanzeiger Fokus, Ausgabe von 03/2022

Die digitale Transformation ist für Unternehmen längst kein «Nice to have» mehr, sondern stellt heute eine essenzielle Voraussetzung für Wettbewerbsfähigkeit dar. Die Fachleute von Staufen.Inova unterstützen Firmen in ihren Digitalisierungsbemühungen und machen das abstrakte Thema «greifbar» – mithilfe eines Dreiecks.

Quelle: NZZ, Ausgabe von 07/2021 

Das heutige Interview, in unserer Serie “heute in 365 Tagen”, liest sich wie ein Aufsatz. Sehr detailgetreu schildert Jane Melmuka, HR-Expertin, wie sie die Tage und die Welt beim Ausbruch der Pandemie erlebt hatte und welche Anstrengungen es bedarf. Ihre HR-Abteilung musste sich schon beinahe “neu erfinden”. Dies ging sicher vielen Firmen so. Zudem hatte sie persönlich eine lebensbedrohliche Krise in dieser Zeit zu überstehen. 

Digitalisation has been influencing our society for more than two decades now, making daily life far more convenient, accelerating our economy and enabling new business models and sources of revenue. Nevertheless, even today the capacity of inertia often seemed to be infinitely greater than the need to initiate long overdue changes – particularly in the manufacturing sector. 

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.

Optimisation measures tend to concentrate on internal processes. On the contrary, the focus is all too rarely on the increasingly numerous partners within the company’s own value creation network. This is an error, as crisis situations highlight that innnumerable companies need to reconfigure their supply chains. Our approach is to think holistically: classical Supply Chain Management becomes Supply Chain Network Management. 

Quelle: Tagesanzeiger Fokus, Ausgabe von 11/2021

Heutige Industrieproduktionen beruhen auf komplexen, mehrstufigen Lieferketten. Sie ermöglichen eine nie gekannte Effizienz und Produktivität. Geringe Fertigungstiefe, Just-in-time-Logistik mit langen Seetransporten sowie regionale Konzentration von Lieferanten nach Kostenkriterien erfordern reibungslose Prozesse ohne Risiko.

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.