Even during my time as Quality Manager at our Recklinghausen site, I worked on improving our quality standards and eliminating quality problems to increase customer satisfaction and reduce internal production costs with the help of Continuous Improvement and the methods behind it.
From 2017 to 2023, I then worked full-time as Continuous Improvement Manager for Central Europe with plants in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
This is essentially about optimizing processes and workflows, documenting them systematically and rolling them out to other areas, plants or even company-wide.
Unfortunately, my experience has shown that it does not work with a rigid, implemented system, but that each project is rolled out individually, preferably by the original initiator, or is strongly supported. Otherwise, many solutions will not work in other areas or locations and this weakens the idea of continuous improvement enormously and it very quickly loses the original idea and support.
