“Best of Consulting” is given to SMBs and since last week Staufen AG from Köngen has proudly carried the title of this award from Wirtschaftswoche and the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Management und Beratung. With its project for Recaro Aircraft Seating it won through against numerous well-known competitors in the supply chain management category. Within only nine months it succeeded in increasing internal product quality data by 60 per cent and did so by introducing shop-floor management in production at the Schwäbisch Hall business. Staufen AG established the fundamental requirements, supervised its implementation and coached the management in learning a new leadership culture and necessary procedures. As a result, shop-floor management is now firmly established at Recaro Aircraft Seating, even today, as the consultants have largely withdrawn from the project, and it makes a crucial contribution to the company’s consistently superior performance. This is why Recaro Aircraft Seating has also earned Boeing’s acknowledgement as a “gold status” supplier. For Staufen AG the “Best of Consulting” Award is already its third distinction in SMB consultancy. In July 2010 it received the “Top Consultant” Award thanks to positive client assessments from compamedia GmbH, and the ASCO Award in Switzerland also in 2010.

The “best seat maker in our customers’ opinion” – this aim has been at the core of Recaro Aircraft Seating’s mission statement since 2006. In 2009 the company made the breakthrough in terms of quality with the aid of shop-floor management and Staufen AG. This was achieved through a consistent alignment of all its operational procedures to an efficient, flexible and disruption-free workflow in production – with the focus on leadership. The key to achieving quality is daily early meetings on the ground, including senior management once a week, along with what is termed the shop-floor board. The board includes all the relevant information about work safety, staffing, quality and output on simple forms that are prepared with impact and visible to everyone. This means problem areas are quickly identified and management can target them specifically. Endless PowerPoint presentations, reporting and floods of emails are no longer required.

With the close involvement and cooperation of staff, Recaro Aircraft Seating has managed to turn the new system into a positively perceived experience. The constant presence of personal success and failure may soon arouse an impression of being under permanent control. “But the point of shop-floor management is to provide assistance and enable staff to solve problems as independently as possible”, explains Martin Haas, Staufen’s managing director and founder and an expert in shop-floor management. “Employees at Recaro Aircraft Seating have understood the principles of shop-floor management and live them every day. If nothing else, it’s one of the reasons for the great success of this project. Our thanks go to them as well as to managing director Mark Hiller, production manager Joachim Ley and technical supervisor Manfred Hausser. Without our far-sighted clients we would not be able to conduct our consultancy business as effectively as we do.”