Using Plant Expertise to Combat the Skills Shortage
Interview with Thorsten Bung, Managing Director of Kuhne GmbH
With over 90 years of experience in the market, the Kuhne Group has become one of the leading European manufacturers of film and sheet production equipment. Managing Director Thorsten Bung revealed in an interview with Wirtschaftsforum how his current innovations not only mitigate the impacts of the skills shortage at his clients but also eliminate their operational blindness – and where the Kuhne Group had to adjust its own processes and mind-settings in the past.
Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Bung, Kuhne has been a skilled manufacturer of plastic extrusion plants in the market for over 90 years - what differentiates your company from its competitors?
Thorsten Bung: A significant role is certainly played by our comprehensive manufacturing depth: Many of our market peers are bound by frame contracts with their suppliers and must concentrate on developing standard plants for this reason alone. Kuhne, on the other hand, continues to rely on its grown Locally-Made and Customized-Engineering approach, under which we even have our own machining operation. We want to not only protect our Intellectual Property rights but also always develop a precise solution for the individual requirements of our customers. Because at the end of the day, our machines are a means to an end, enabling our customers to produce their products in the required quality with a reliable output - the responsibility to make that possible ultimately lies with us.
European Business Forum: How is the collaboration with your customers detailed?
Thorsten Bung: It might sound a bit lofty, but about two-thirds of the actual plant engineering starts with us already in sales, when we design preliminary layouts for a new facility based on the given production conditions in the respective customer environment. It's not uncommon for our counterparts to realize at this phase what is actually possible: Many started out with low-budget designs, but today possess significantly different liquid assets, which can quickly open up much more efficient production possibilities with a sensible investment. Through our grown expertise, we want to effectively reduce this operational blindness that inevitably emerges in any organization at some point.
European Business Forum: Is this the case for Kuhne as well?
Thorsten Bung: Definitely. For example, we somewhat neglected our knowledge management over time. Additionally, in the past, we probably remained below our potential in terms of advancing our specialists' skills. We've since established internal training processes and proactively approach people in our company, for instance, offering them further training as industrial plant electronics technicians or mechanics. We have also developed an internal corporate career ladder, which based on this offers further career prospects, such as in sales or as a project planner.
Wirtschaftsforum: The general shortage of skilled workers is likely to pose major challenges for your customers as well – can Kuhne support them in this respect too?
Thorsten Bung: The pain related to this issue is probably even higher among our customers than with us, as many of them inevitably operate in a three-shift system, which makes it even more difficult to recruit qualified mechanics or electronics technicians. Many companies therefore have to resort to using auxiliary workers – a step, however, that may come with certain deficits in expertise. We aim to address this issue with our Machine-Human Interface, which effectively closes this knowledge gap: Unlike a Human-Machine Interface, the operator no longer has to make extensive inputs on the machine – instead, he receives a recipe suggestion for the respective product that is being manufactured. The operator then only has to take care of the necessary fine-tuning.
Wirtschaftsforum: How difficult was it to develop this solution?
Thorsten Bung: Primarily, many internal barriers had to be overcome at Kuhne and we had to constantly remind ourselves that one cannot eat an elephant whole, but must slice it into easily digestible pieces first. This approach does not come naturally to our company, as we engage comparatively little in basic research and development work, and rather in project business, where we naturally always think of the final solution in the customer environment: For this fundamental innovation, however, it was crucial to proceed iteratively and agilely in small steps – and perhaps also proactively manufacture two rolls instead of just one, because we would surely produce a crash in the initial field trials. Ultimately, our organization as a whole learned a lot in this process – and has certainly become more agile.
Wirtschaftsforum: What other innovations are particularly important for your customers at the moment?
Thorsten Bung: Flexibility and reduction of set-up times have been increasingly on the agenda of many companies lately, especially in the food industry: There, many extruders have manufactured the same film product based on long-term contracts over the years – conditions that no longer exist today, prompting quite a few of these companies to transform into Custom-Sheet-Companies, which must produce completely different products from one day to the next, resulting in entirely new equipment requirements. Furthermore, sustainability is also playing an increasingly important role – even in markets where this was not necessarily the case before, such as in the USA. Kuhne has also done a lot of development work in this context in recent years, such as on the use of recyclates and energy recovery, which some of our customers take to extremes: One of them, located in a country with very cold winters, even regenerates the energy bound in the process and heats the whole village with it. Here, the focus is often no longer on the individual machine with its motors and gears, but rather on the entire factory environment, making even the size of the facility a relevant factor. Kuhne will continue to vigorously drive these diverse innovations in the coming years – based on its strength as a grown family business with short decision paths and an absolute customer orientation.