Industrial Excellence Award (IEA)

Henkel’s Supply Chain Laundry & Home Care

Henkel’s Supply Chain Laundry & Home Care provides sustainable brands and products which are renowned for their high quality and performance. For consumers, Henkel’s brands have become an integral part of their lives. The company aims at becoming even more customer-focused, innovative, and agile.The Holthausen-plant, one of the largest facilities out of 33 plants globally, has embarked for the last years on a digital transformation. The Business Unit’s main achievements are the adoption of digital technologies in the process industry, the deployment of lean management experts and process engineers to all of their manufacturing cells and the enablement of worker participation through distribution of tablets to every employee. Productivity has increased double-digit as a result of these activities.

During the pandemic, Henkel’s Supply Chain Laundry & Home Care has demonstrated exemplary resilience through quick adaptation of their product portfolio as demand shifted in unimaginable ways. This type of management agility contributed to greatly satisfying consumer needs and softening the impact of the crisis.

Nobilia

Nobilia offers intelligently engineered kitchens with superb design at a very attractive value for money proposition. In particular, the company offers the retail market a complete package kitchen from a single source: with intelligent accessories, attractive built-in sinks and a wide range of electric appliance brands from entry level price to the premium high-end segment.

At Verl, where two of three major production and assembly plants are located, delivery by the company’s own truck fleet is planned first, before production is actually scheduled. Highly qualified drivers ensure professional and secure furniture transport at all times. The company’s main achievements, among others, are the vertically integrated and automated business processes allowing for fast, secure and complete kitchen delivery to retailers, the dedicated customer interface aiming at immediate query resolution of any kind, the entrepreneurial and innovative culture at all levels of the organization, and the relentless strive for further automation and process improvements.

As a market leader in Europe, nobilia supports a sheer endless number of retailer brands in a variety of distribution channels and has made premium features increasingly affordable while also introducing key innovations. Lately, it has entered into the D2C market with a standardized product line where consumers can choose from a whole range of services including installing the kitchen at their home.

Simonelli Group

Simonelli Group is a leading Italian company, located in the “Marche” region in the centre-eastern part of Italy, operating in the coffee industry sector and producing professional and home espresso coffee machines and grinders.

The company, present on the market with two brands (Nuova Simonelli and Victoria Arduino) tailoring two different market segments, has a turnover of more than 100 million euros and an export exceeding 95%, an outstanding percentage for a SME of around 150 employees. Revenue growth (from 19M€ in 2009 to 115M€ in 2021), profitability and customer retention values have been remarkable also now in COVID pandemic times.

Beside Europe, Simonelli sells all over the world, mainly in Asia and America. Distributors of coffee equipment, coffee roasters companies, restaurant chains, coffee shops chains, baristas and independent bar owners are the main customers. The market is segmented in Mainstream players (chains, roasters, bars, restaurants) and Specialty players (small roasters, coffee shops, baristas). In this arena, Simonelli serves some of the top global players such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Lavazza, UCC, Suntory, etc.

Innovation, design, service support, sustainability and education are key pillars in the Simonelli’s strategy and this has been proven by several initiatives launched (or at least not interrupted) also during the COVID pandemic. In terms of digitalization, Simonelli has carried out several initiatives in the last two years to improve both its products&services and its business processes. Digitalization has contributed in a relevant way to extend the Simonelli’s offer from products to diversified services.

As far as the Operations and the Supply Chain Management are concerned, the average performance of Simonelli have not been affected by the pandemic. On the contrary, there have been relevant improvements on several aspects such as energy consumption, CO2 emissions, quality and flexibility.

Simonelli applies a LEAN management model to manage production and suppliers according to a Just-In-Time approach. Linked to this, Simonelli has implemented several lean management tools such as KANBAN, SMED, 5S, POKAYOKE, VISUAL MANAGEMENT, etc. starting more than a decade ago. Beside the hard tools of lean, Simonelli has worked intensively in the last two years also on the people pillar of lean aiming at improving the motivation and the involvement of everyone in the company through different initiatives.

TMG Automotive

TMG Automotive researches, develops, and manufactures materials for automotive interior used in the production of seating and panels for major OEMs such as BMW, Daimler, Toyota and Volvo. Its industrial footprint spans two plants in Portugal and two more in China and the U.S.

TMG Automotive stands out as an innovation leader in their sector. By consistently devoting more than 6% of revenues and 10% of its headcount to fuel the development of new materials with superior technical and sustainability performance, it has developed a unique product portfolio enabling differentiation in a space otherwise driven mainly by cost competitiveness.

During the pandemic, TMG Automotive excelled at aligning all areas of the organization to protect the cash flow. They also decided not to stop any production plant despite not having orders from customers—something that proved very useful post-lockdown, when their competitors lagged behind because of long ramp ups. On a longer-term perspective, TMG Automotive has already embarked in an ambitious digitalization roadmap that will help bringing their operations to the next level.