From the modest town of Papenburg on the river Ems, Meyer Werft broke into the world market for cruise ships in just a few years. The company is now one of the leading builders in the sector. Yet it has remained a family enterprise, going back six generations. Bernard Meyer is currently at the helm. His trademark consists of keen ideas that are resolutely pursued.

How the Hamburg maintenance base saves ten valuable days on a general overhaul of an Airbus A340—Dr. Thomas Stüger, Managing Board member for Production and Service at Lufthansa Technik AG, knows that the flow and takt principles in place in Porsche sports car manufacturing can provide a lesson in how to carry out general overhauls of commercial aircraft. The benefit can be summed up in one sentence: Instead of requiring 36 days to carry out an IL2 check on an Airbus A340-300, it now only takes 26 days.

Getting to work rather than just talking about it—the consultants from Bietigheim don’t put their solutions on paper; they put them into action.

A practical Porsche Consulting project very near to the hearts of ordinary citizens brought an interesting fact to light: Road works, especially on motorways, can actually be completed much faster. Better organization saves time and money, reduces gridlock, and even increases the quality.

At Porsche, tomorrow’s exciting new office environment is already a reality, at least at subsidiary Porsche Consulting. The consulting company of the auto manufacturer has decreed a “lean office” for its headquarter and the office in Milan. In reorganizing their office space, the consultants followed the “Lean Management” guidelines. The results of this self-therapy: The Porsche Consulting building, whose approximately 2,700 square meters were originally designed for 150 employees, now accommodates 220.

Lean as a principle of life, 24 hours a day—is something like that even possible? It is, and it’s even worthwhile. Those who look closely at everyday life will find approaches and solutions that match the principles from Porsche Consulting. Upon closer inspection, there is hardly any area of our lives that is not lean or that cannot become lean. The best part of the following fictitious but illustrative self-experiment is that cutting out waste promises greater quality of life.

Porsche Consulting Italia considers the Biesse Group in Pesaro on the Adriatic one of its benchmark customers, as it has shown that lean management principles can work even in a country famed for la dolce vita. All cultural barriers have been broken down. Thanks to German determination, Japanese methods and Italian passion, the manufacturer of machinery for processing wood, glass and stone has been able to reorganize itself into a lean company.

How lean processes are organized and controlled—People are creatures of habit. Everyone who strives to make necessary changes notices this. Porsche Consulting has compiled a list of factors that management and staff should keep in mind if changes are to be put successfully into practice.

Sports can serve as a guide. They can teach us how best to cope with extreme situations. Champions focus on success factors equally applicable to the working environment: consistency, discipline, control and continuous improvement, to name just a few.

Völker AG manufactures modern hospital and healthcare beds. Despite the fraught situation in the public health sector, this mid-sized German firm is holding its own in the market. That is in no small measure due to the company’s managing director, who is always bursting with new ideas.

Changing rigid structures—that is no easy task especially in the traditional organization of hospitals. But that doesn’t stop Dr. Michel Nathan, director of the Centre Hospitalier Emile Mayrisch in Luxembourg. From his perspective, reorienting processes can only bring benefits to both physicians and patients.

Professor Klaus Hekking went for his annual checkup—and the course of events left him less than enthused. Since then, the jurist and CEO of SRH Holding, a Heidelberg-based health and educational service provider, has made it his mission to track down time traps and outdated structures in hospitals. If it will aid the cause of optimization, then Hekking redesigns entire hospitals from top to bottom. In an interview, he explains how to implement impersonal concepts such as efficiency and process optimization in the very personal environment of a hospital.

Thanks to Merz Spezial Dragees, everyone has been talking about the venerable Frankfurt firm for quite some time; and its Alzheimer’s medication Memantine has brought worldwide recognition. Merz, which specializes in neurology and esthetic medicine, aims to increase competitiveness with respect to its larger-scale pharmaceutical competitors by utilizing improved production and development processes. “We have to work even more efficiently than our large competitors,” says Managing Director Hartmut Erlinghagen, who joined his Lean Management Officer Dr. Stefan Schacht for an interview with Caracho.

Michael Macht was a part of Porsche Consulting right from the start. Today, the 49-year-old is the Chairman of the Managing Board at Porsche AG and probably owes his career in no small part to his love and enthusiasm for lean production processes. Even during the turnaround of the sports car manufacturer at the beginning of the nineties, he was so successful with Japanese kaizen management methods that he was invited to become the Managing Director of the newly founded Porsche Consulting GmbH. “We were convinced that the management methods we had applied at Porsche could also be implemented in all industries and sectors,” says Macht.

Racing for sponsors—This was a new experience for the consultants from Porsche Consulting: jeans and T-shirts instead of the standard suit or lab coat, a pit lane and paddock in place of offices or shop floors. Their brief from Porsche AG: to develop solutions for more professional marketing for the racing team at the Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup.

The customer is king—this formula for success is unshakeable. Nevertheless, all too often consumers experience disappointment—especially when it comes to what appears to be a casual approach to processing their orders. This does not have to be. Because optimized processes can work wonders, even beyond the realm of industrial production—as can be seen from the example of complaints management.

At the Porsche Akademie, clients glean first-hand experience in the methods employed by a lean company. This is achieved by working on simulated production lines. The variety of methods used to achieve significant learning effects has been well received. Here, emulation is encouraged. And numerous clients are now setting up their own employee training workshops.

External added value is important to every company. In Porsche’s automobile production, for example, it accounts for more than 80 percent. It’s not just a matter of profitability—instead, it has far more to do with the fact that products can only be raised to a world-class level with the right partners.

There is a lot to criticize about briefcases. And indeed, a perfectly designed and constructed case would considerably simplify the work of many mangers. But it is hard to find. Consultants from Porsche Consulting have taken on the “Briefcase Problem”—and with a wink, applied the same lean principles to it as they do to sports car production.