strategy

Over the past decades, circular economy has established itself as an important strategy for tackling sustainability challenges. Its holistic approach aims to use resources efficiently and minimize waste. This article aims to identify and evaluate the numerous challenges connected to the successful implementation and expansion of the circular economy approach. Economic, technological, social and political aspects are examined to provide a comprehensive insight into the complexity of the strategy and its implementation. The article concludes that a successful circular economy can only be achieved through the coordinated cooperation of different stakeholders and the development of innovative solutions to the identified challenges.

A robust and resilient supply chain is a critical success factor for the competitiveness of manufacturing companies. However, today’s supply chain faces various challenges, such as higher complexities and increasing dynamics coming from megatrends (i. e. globalization and sustainability). The medium-sized drive technology industry, with its global supply chains and high customer requirements, is particularly affected by these challenges. Therefore, digitalization initiatives are crucial. This article analyzes current digitalization projects in the drive technology industry in order to identify relevant trends and fields of application. Synthesized from the industry's target picture for higher resilience/ flexibility, greater transparency and more sustainability along the supply chain, these provide guidance for medium-sized companies and their digitalization strategies. (Only in German)

The recently released book „Große deutsche Familienunternehmen“ [3] describes the history of the 50 biggest family-run companies older than 100 years. Those companies are not „Hidden Champions“ but „Champions of Survival“. Being ranked among the biggest companies in Germany after a development over more than four generations these businesses can serve as an example for outstanding management practices or at least a reason to rethink the own strategy.

Consumergoods but also technical products, pharmaceuticals etc. are increasingly counterfeid. Production and global sales are often controlled by organised crime. The local confiscation of counterfeits does not impress the fraudsters. Effective countermeasures must include the closure of their production facilities.

industrial enterprises to permanently develop new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Besides product innovations, services complementing these products are increasingly used for differentiation purposes. But only the right combination of different services forming a service portfolio allows successful service offering. Therefore, a systematic engineering approach is required to compose a service portfolio that fits to a company’s potentials as well as to customer requirements. However, until today this aspect of service engineering is not continuously and systematically supported.

Processes of profound change are taking place in industrial manufacturing and the service sector, both nationally and internationally. If they are to be or remain competitive, enterprises must be able to adapt and evolve. These new demands are creating particular potentials for planning service providers to apply and offer their know-how as a service worldwide. Above all, the opportunity resulting from supplying services for the complete factory life cycle can be used to develop new customers and markets. Strategic marketing also enables a network of SME to carry out projects worldwide.

Increasing international competition forces German companies to enhance their portfolio of products and services. Facing this strategic decision, the required competencies for successful market positioning have to be analyzed. Such target-oriented investments in competencies of the employees allow companies to gain an outstanding competitive position. Best practice examinations have proven a positive relation between competence investments on the one hand and market attractiveness of products and services as well as employment situation on the other hand. Yet today, there is a lack of systematic and continuous controlling of competence development processes on a strategic level.

In the past few years importance of strategic management increased. Although enterprises invest into the development of strategies, many strategy processes fail in implementation. Today an important factor of influence is respected intuitively only: The level of detail of strategy. This article introduces an industry-proved tool, which determines the right level of detail for a successful strategy-implementation. Furthermore it allows a monitoring of strategy formulation and implementation-situation.