Holistic Business Excellence with Dirk Fischer

The Lean Solutions Podcast

Today on the podcast, I’m talking with Dirk Fischer, an automotive General Manager, Lean Operations Engineering supply chain and Quality Manager expert with more than 25 years of experience.

In this episode, Dirk and I go over system waste, what’s causing it and how you can avoid it. We also go over holistic business excellence and how it relates to system waste.

What You’ll Learn This Episode:

• Dirk’s background in Lean and how he got started
• The definition of System Waste
• How to identify and eliminate System Waste
• Holistic Business Excellence
• How Holistic Business Excellence can help with System Waste
• How you can help drive the Holistic Business approach
• Aspects of Lean that are potentially untapped

About the Guest:

I was born June, 20th 1970 in the Stuttgart area, Southern Germany and finished my mechanical engineering study in September 1992.

I am an automotive General Manager, lean operations, engineering, supply chain and quality management expert with more than 25 years of experience, consistently proving the ability to holistically turn around underperforming plants and groups of plants.

The various turnarounds were mainly achieved through inspiring leadership for change and creating a LEAN KPI driven continuous improvement culture. I continuously implement effective action plans, which are designed to rapidly improve Customer satisfaction, Quality, Cost, Delivery, Safety, Morale AND Working Capital and therefore delivering sustainable bottom line results.

The pattern of success was usually to start with intensive observations on the shop floor (Go to Gemba) to really understand the problems, detailed discussions and reflections with the team, coaching the plant management team in order to establish and implement the most important actions, define high impact KPIs, provide tools to monitor progress and review frequently for effectiveness of implemented actions. This approach enabled me to frequently develop high performance teams.

My leadership style and my acting and thinking is highly influenced by Deming/Ackoff/Toyota Way/ Theory of Constraints/Stephen Covey and others.

In the past 10 years I held various COO/CRO roles with a responsibility ranging from a single plant with 50 million € of sales up to international multi site responsibility with 20 plants and 3,6 billion € of sales.

Having worked for more than 10 years for international Anglo-American companies with strong financial focus, I am used to work in environments with strong financial controls and reporting and intensive budgeting processes.

Important Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dirk-fischer-06850011?trk=author_mini-profile_title&originalSubdomain=de

https://www.gaoexperts.com/

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