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DR. LARS DITTMANN

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Leadership experience

As a manager, I have over 14 years of experience in equipment manufacturing and industrial production with functional expertise in the areas of General & Operations Management, Continuous Improvement & Lean, Quality, Business Processes and Operational Excellence.
 

Industry know-how

I was mainly active in the high voltage switchgear market, but also as a senior consultant, program and project manager in the finance & IT sector, in utility companies, as well as in education and management consulting.
 

Methodological competence

I learned the management consulting trade in a leading global consulting company and the scientific, data-based approach at the University of St. Gallen. I understand technical relationships very quickly thanks to my technical diploma from TU Darmstadt. I am constantly learning and teaching as a lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
 

Personality

As a balanced character, I act prudently and responsibly. I have a passion for organizational development, for developing teams, talents and individuals. I bring my teams together with my enthusiasm for new customer requests, products, technologies and processing systems. When it comes to implementation, I act decisively, resiliently and sustainably, and trusting clients and all stake holders is important to me.

About: About

MY EXPERIENCES

We believe we have experiences, but experiences make us. (Eugène Ionesco)

SET UP CROSS LOCATIONS OPERATION FUNCTION

The new regional management level of the high voltage products division introduced a new Quality and Operations function. Our responsibility was to monitor and improve the performance of several production sites in six countries. The core element was the monthly review cycle, which we newly introduced. My task was to set up the review agenda based on
+QDIP as well as the implementation, the follow-ups and the corrective measures. As a result, the quality and safety culture were improved as well as the on-time delivery through clear guidelines and binding priorities. The +QDIP approach is cascaded down to the production line as an integral part of the daily shop floor management.

SETTING UP A NEW PROFIT CENTER

The gas-insulated switchgear business unit was about to introduce a new product line with a radically changed value chain and a new processing system: conversion from engineer-to-order to configure-to-order and from standalone production to flow production. It was my job to separate a new profit center from the existing unit. We achieved break even for the new product line and a reduction in lead time from 2 weeks to one day.

DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW REGIONAL QUALITY FUNCTION

My task was to build a new regional quality function with the corresponding processes, systems and a progressive team culture. I established the regional processes and standards, which were recorded in a jointly documented quality manual. This manual was also used in other regions and became the basis for a quality system that was applied in practice. Cross-location quality cases could be resolved in half the time compared to the previous isolated set-up. The team approach led to drastically reduced quality cases and a halving of quality costs (Cost of Poor Quality). Cross-location learning and mutual fertilization should be seen as the greatest lever for improving performance.

INTRODUCING CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND LEAN

I had the opportunity to introduce continuous improvement and lean approaches both as operations manager and as a regional and local staff function at a global conglomerate. My experience is that change management is the greatest challenge. My assignment as a line manager was most effective when I worked bit by bit on the lean culture in the daily shop floor rounds and thus gradually subjected the organization to a change. The main successes are reduced quality costs, improved on-time delivery, reduced lead times, production areas, stocks and costs.

SAP INTRODUCTION

The local branch of an industrial conglomerate reduced the number of SAP systems in the country from 12 to 3. Our unit was the pilot for the new master system. The challenge was to adapt best practice processes that were created for the entire country organization. I managed the user organization with 16 sub-project managers, 70 project employees and 700 users. A main responsibility was to report the go / no-go readiness to the steering committee. A great deal was at stake because the high weekly project costs had to be assessed against the risk of a complete or partial system failure after go-live. Ultimately, we had a system start without business interruptions and a good pilot running under the conditions of a very tight timeline.

About: Projekte

WHAT BUSINESS PARTNERS, EMPLOYEES, COLLEAGUES AND SUPERVISORS SAY ABOUT ME

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CEO NKT A/S at NKT

ALEXANDER KARA

Even in conflicting situations, Lars Dittmann manages to bundle the various interests and move everyone to take a common approach. He is empathetic and has cultural sensitivity to meet employees, team colleagues and superiors where they are.

About: Team

PUBLICATIONS

Anyone who has expertise should also share it

Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag. Doctorate at University of St.Gallen, HSG

Lars Dittmann defines and operationalizes visibility in the Auto-ID context and develops a holistic explanatory model that includes strategic and normative aspects in addition to the specific RFID business case.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Long before the animal welfare label and many other scandals, this newspaper article addresses the gaps in the quality systems and calls for monitoring with bite.

Workshop proceedings, Technical University Berlin

AMetaCar: a Mediated eCommerce Solution for the Used Car Market. With a pioneering spirit, two students design the structure of a meta search engine.


MORE TO COME ...


About: CV

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