Boysen shows how process innovation helps efficiency: the German-owned exhaust systems company has had to match the productivity demands of its biggest customer, BMW, by investing in automation

摘要

One of the automotive industry's daily challenges is to bring manufacturing costs down even though the number of product variants is increasing and the batch sizes reduce, which impacts on economies of scale. Yet for some companies, this challenge is also an opportunity. Boysen is a family-owned exhaust system supplier with sales in 2005 of around ?425 million and 1,250 employees worldwide. Over 90 per cent of the Boysen staff work in Germany, a country not exactly well-known for cheap labour. Still Boysen has no intention of shifting its production to low-cost countries. "Instead we have invested around ?150 million in five German sites over the past five years," says managing director Rolf Geisel.