The previous article described the necessity of standardisation of the FESSMANN product range. The benefits are very clear in very short delivery times and best quality. Standardised products permit clearly defined processes. How to react, however, when customer-specific demands call for custom solutions and known processes can no longer be applied?
Since FESSMANN also implements individual requirements away from the defined standards, the design department uses agile working methods as well. Agile methods serve to react more quickly to changing requirements and still implement the individual solutions "closer to the customer" with the required quality. They are based on individual departments breaking up the classical hierarchy structures and working only in constantly changing teams. Every customer-specific requirement is described in the form of a "user story". From this, individual design tasks are compiled, inserted into a backlog and priorities are set, e.g., based on urgency. An employee who has finished his or her task will start the task with the highest priority next. This way, every employee can take on different roles in various design tasks and teams, to contribute to completing a design task. The essential advantages of this method are, e.g., in a self-organising and learning organisation, shorter development cycles and generation of products with higher customer benefits. FESSMANN thus faces today's challenges, including high dynamics on global markets, highly complex projects and even more customer orientation.
This method enables the design department to process 250 different customer orders per year on average. The scopes of the individual orders range from individual cooking boilers to large projects with several industrial plants such as the Ti3000 or the fully continuous plant TF4000 with connected automation solutions. It is also noticeable that 20% of these customer orders on average contain individual design solutions.
Without such a flexible structure of the design department, this workload would not be manageable.
