“Asking the right questions from the start” 

Is Lean Management used throughout your company? 

Marcel Rupprecht: At Böllhoff, we have been working with Lean Management methods in the production areas for a long time and also use them in accordance with our corporate strategy. What is new for us is the use in the administrative area. This is how we break down silo thinking of individual departments. We replace it with a holistic, end-to-end process. The result of this new way of thinking about processes: more involvement in the big picture, fewer complaints, greater satisfaction for all involved, and lower costs.

What does this mean for day-to-day operations? 

Marcel Rupprecht: Lean makes our lives easier. We no longer sit in meetings and set new agendas, but work in a goal-oriented manner. In the 30-minute regular communications we introduced across all teams, we focus on the three topics important to us: deviation management, incident management, and information and task management.

Does this also work across departments? 

Marcel Rupprecht: Absolutely. A practical example from our service and trading business: In the past, our many, many customer requests were passed from department to department and processed with too little filtering. In line with our Lean principles of “focused, excellent, creates value,” we are now very careful not to get lost in the details, but to examine inquiries much earlier to see whether they really are optimally suited for quotation in terms of application technology, logistics and business. In this way, we avoid long – and often useless – internal and external process loops. As a result, we have increased the success rate by better qualifying inquiries while improving effectiveness. In short, by asking the right questions from the start, we reduce effort and increase quality – for the ultimate perfect connection for and with our customers.