Future use of new Technologies and Processes
With the help of the new Global Manufacturing Operations (GMO) division, we intend to support our regions in providing their patients and customers with highest-quality products at the best price in the future, while at the same time enabling the regionally responsible Board members and their teams to focus their work on developing and growing their dialysis services business. In 2011, one focus of GMO will be to fully integrate processes along the manufacturing chain in the Asia-Pacific region as well as in the smaller production sites in Europe and Latin America into the new division.
We will continue to harmonize our processes globally along the manufacturing chain, for example by converting the current regional production systems to a common information technology system in the coming years. We will also introduce uniform IT systems in quality management, for example to document our processes internally and for complaint management.
In the area of strategic purchasing, we will further enhance our supplier management, both within and across regions. This will enable us to safeguard our supply with high-quality raw materials and semifinished products at affordable conditions – an important task especially given the growing demand for raw materials on global procurement markets. While in 2010 GMO focused mainly on aligning procurement strategies for production materials across the regions, in the current business year we intend to identify in depth where we can achieve synergies across the Company for “indirect demand”. This includes all goods and services that are not directly required to manufacture our products, such as IT, energy, freight and consultancy services.
In supply chain management, we will continue to strengthen cooperation between the GMO production network and the supply chain management teams in our regions, with the aim of further increasing our flexibility and efficiency along the production chain, and thus preparing ourselves as well as we can for further growth. Furthermore, we will continue to implement regional initiatives such as SCALE in the International segment (see “Our product business” section) to further harmonize our processes. Within SCALE, for example, we will integrate further product groups into our new planning system for production demand and inventory management; in 2011, these will be dialysis solutions and dialyzers.