Experienced in R&D management

In the last few years the management of a global R&D organization has become the center of my work and delivered to me a constant flow of interesting challenges, starting at the very first day as general R&D manager. At that day the responsibility of my team was extended from just a few product lines at one local site to the whole global product portfolio of the business unit. Revenue, number of products, the number of teams and the number of local ways of doing it were multiplied. As consequence all up to then site focused engineering groups for product development and product maintenance and manufacturing engineering had to be reorganized, some closed and some founded. As R&D we took the lead or were deeply involved in several product transfers, site closures but also in some acquisitions and plant openings all over the world. The main tasks in this period were product knowledge transfer, securing design control, improving mutual understanding and most important building mutual trust by personal networking.

After building the fundamentals in working together with several sites for the maintenance of products we shifted our focus to establish a flexible global collaboration for product development. For this we reorganized the main development center and founded new ones in China and India. Again the main tasks were product knowledge transfer, this time even more process knowledge transfer and finally a step by step integration of engineers in global project teams. This was a stony path and one with quite a bit of steps backwards. The targeted increase in efficiency respectively reduce in costs could never be achieved. Especially the staff turnover at contractors for engineering services has become an issue causing constantly recurring "easy" mistakes and retraining needs. 

The fundaments for a robust organization, which can react fast to disruptions are fast and reliable information, either formal by reports or informal by employees which communicates openly and without hesitation about negative news. Therefore I implemented a strict, cascading reporting system and a appropriate detailed forward looking budget controlling in which daily local information were condensed step by step to a global report. The implementation of lean development methods like cascading daily stand up meetings (SUM) and standard A3 report templates have been a key elements.

To lead a global distributed development means for me to respect the otherness of employees around the globe, their (cultural, historic or whatever) differences, their different local behaviors/approaches and most important their different expectations. Mutual understanding and the feeling of respect for all these different ways of thinking are essential for mutual trust which again is the base for successful team work and also for real buy in to a new global way of thinking. There is no way to be perfect in this but people feel if you try and this can connect separated groups to a team to one R&D.

As a member of the business unit (BU) leadership team I was deeply involved in all aspects of business development from the creation of the vision/mission statement over multi year product and market strategies to the detailed annual operation planning. As the head of R&D my focus was on the project portfolio planning which we based on multiple criteria. Because of the complexity of the product portfolio, the number of involved persons and the multiple dependencies between project proposals this exercise was long and effortful. In this process we applied lately strategic deployment to break down the vision and long term strategic objectives in next years goals, in improvement priorities and finally in projects and project goals for each leader/function. For R&D I further broke down these goals to each group and finally to each employee. At the end all personal goals of each engineer were directly linked to the top level strategy.

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