A Review of BPM-Club Expert Dialogue – Production Companies Pay Attention!

With a breathtaking view of the Frankfurt skyline, Prof. Harald Zimmermann from the Deggendorf Technical University gave an entertaining talk last week at the BPM Club Expert Dialogue. The title of his Keynote was: ” Lean management is dead, long live the process management! “. Regardless of whether addressing the banking industry, or production and manufacturing industries, his question was even more exciting: Why do companies succeed or fail to introduce a sustainable and successful production system?

Have you already asked yourself this question?

Prof. Harald Zimmermann has been Professor of Melting and Forming of Silicate Glass at the Deggendorf Technical University (THD) since March 1, 2019, focusing on the fields of glass technology, industrial IT and lean management.

Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Harald Zimmermann

To briefly summarize the theme of the evening, Professor Zimmerman stated: “One can say that most lean approaches and tools within the manufacturing industry are arbitrarily transferable, as long as the overall model has been sufficiently adapted to the corporate culture. However, the process industry is failing conspicuously often because the conditions differ fundamentally from the manufacturing industry.” Production systems cannot simply be transferred here.

“You cannot simply transfer our behavior from male to female or vice versa – we have to somehow endure each other (and translate).”

A look at the value chains

Prof. Zimmermann went on to explain that an essential part of the added value in the manufacturing and service sectors is the execution of activities. In the process industry, this is different: there, it is the entire process chain that adds value. It is therefore essential for production companies to describe process chains precisely so that they can truly understand and master them.

Currently, Prof. Zimmermann is supporting the technology user center of the THD in Spiegelau in order to quickly identify potential for optimization by analyzing processes on-site and visualizing them using the iGrafx BPM platform.

Thanks to our speaker Prof. Harald Zimmermann as well as the BPM & O GmbH for the great expert dialogue format and the nice welcome of our guests.