From Automotive Engineering Service Provider to General Industry Supplier

Interview with Michael Böhler, Founder and Managing Director of sbp

In ideas workshops, sbp, together with its customers, develops tailor-made solutions that later become plants

S&B Automotive is now transforming into the company sbp, thereby emphatically underlining its ambitions for the future: as the established engineering service provider from the automotive industry aims to leverage its mature solution expertise in plant planning and realization in significantly broader manufacturing segments. In the interview, Managing Director Michael Böhler revealed which values sbp definitely wants to remain true to and where other industrial companies sometimes differ significantly from the automotive segment.

Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Böhler, your company has been known as S&B Automotive Engineering; but recently you have been operating as sbp with a new Corporate Identity in the market – what prompted this change?

Michael Böhler: The acronym sbp stands for Sandmair Böhler Partner, or in exaggerated terms: for our past, present, and future. Gerd Sandmair was my founding partner who left our company five years ago. Today, I manage it and now I want to prepare it with new leaders we were able to recruit recently, based on our developed foundation, for the next generation.

Wirtschaftsforum: Against this backdrop, the word Automotive has also disappeared from your name, even though your customer list reads like the Who's Who of the German car industry.

Michael Böhler: Our decades-long collaboration with car manufacturers and their suppliers has strengthened us and will continue to be an essential part of our business activity. However, initial experiences in recent years have shown that our comprehensive range of services can also provide significant added value in the general industry sector. We now want to pursue this path even more vigorously – and transform ourselves from an engineering service provider to a solutions provider.

Wirtschaftsforum: In which areas do you specifically support your customers?

Michael Böhler: We are primarily involved in the planning and realization of production facilities. It is important to us to work in a partnership and solution-oriented manner: we listen carefully and are readily accessible.

sbp Employees — Automation and robotics have reached the breadth of the middle class

sbp Workshop — The final solution is implemented

Wirtschaftsforum: How exactly does the cooperation with your company work?

Michael Böhler: Often, we start with an initial idea workshop with our respective client, discussing how and in what quantities they want to manufacture their desired products and the level of automation they aim for. After talks with all the affected sectors, we then develop two or three solution proposals, which we present to the client. If there is interest in further collaboration, we move on to the detailed planning phase up to the joint preparation of tender documents or the planning of internal fixture construction. With our engineering services, we can also design corresponding 2D and 3D constructions in the virtual factory. At each phase, there is a straightforward exit option for our client.

Wirtschaftsforum: Sometimes you even manage to significantly increase productivity without using a single robot.

Michael Böhler: We were recently commissioned by a vehicle component manufacturer to analyze their assembly line. They wanted to double their output from three vehicles per hour to six — an ambitious but realistic goal in this context. A discussion with the production employees revealed that the recently acquired turner was not accepted at all and could thus be removed without any problem — this created space for reorganizing the screw storage, which could now be moved directly to the assembly stations. Along with some other logistical measures, this easily achieved the desired doubling of output — for minimal money and without a single new technological solution.