We are vigorously pursuing our efforts to optimize every single element of our global supply chain (Glossary) . Alongside our established programs to reduce manufacturing costs and maximize profitability, we have identified further potential cost savings through our ProFuture program. This will require structural or organizational changes.
We are expanding our Group-wide approach to purchasing management by increasing the centralization and pooling of purchasing processes. We are also maintaining our ongoing policy of working with partners and suppliers to exploit further potential cost savings.
In the area of production, we hope to give ourselves further room to maneuver, to allow us to react flexibly to market factors such as fluctuating prices for raw materials or pressure on our prices. This will primarily involve establishing the legal and organizational independence of our factories in Paderborn, Shanghai and Singapore, and implementing standardized best-practice processes. Our goal is to further accelerate order processing and delivery. With an emphasis on complete cost transparency, we also intend to achieve comparability between our production sites’ cost structures so that we can make our project, market and customer-specific manufacturing processes even more flexible and competitive. With regard to logistics, we will continue to integrate suppliers into our enterprise resource planning (ERP) (Glossary) system as a means of achieving further potential improvements in our partnerships with contracted suppliers.
