Ambitious to establish a future-proofed plant

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Last month, Sunconfex welcomed Christian Heise as our new Plant Manager in Leipheim. His ambition is to apply his background as an industrial engineer, as well as his manufacturing and commercial experience in several industries, to Sunconfex’ manufacturing processes.

Christian: “Our customers are constantly growing. To ensure their growth, Sunconfex has to follow. This leads us to three main challenges: setting up a fast and flexible organisation, increasing the efficiency of today's production processes, and taking the production to the next level, including automation and digitalisation. To summarise: I want to establish a future-proof plant in Leipheim.”

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Sunconfex is clearly committed to operational experience

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Even after a few weeks, Christian’s focus is clear: “The production process is already geared to deliver just-in-time. But to be prepared for our customers’ growth, we must take care of improving our processes as well as our organisation.”

“The first thing we’ll analyse is the manufacturing process as it is today to increase efficiency. Therefore, we'll consider Lean Manufacturing tools like Value Stream Mapping to identify bottlenecks and to prioritise projects”, Christian says.

“In addition, we will install a work standard at every workstation to manufacture our products in the most economical way. To reduce downtime of our machinery, we’ll set up total productive maintenance”, he continues.

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“Furthermore, we’ll work on a flexible shift model to absorb production peaks during the summer”, says Christian. “Those optimisations will ensure that we can continue to guarantee Sunconfex's core values: quality, lead time and delivery performance. Sunconfex is clearly committed to operational excellence, and I’m happy to contribute to that."

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Increase capacities by automation and digitalisation

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Christian: “Continuously analysing and optimising production processes is a part of our daily business in production. But we also have to think of the strategic side of increasing our capacities, considering safety, quality, costs and delivery. Therefore, we have to work smarter, not harder.”

"We need to develop intelligent solutions to automate certain manual production processes to reduce their cycle times.” Christian says. “Implementing a digital manufacturing order controlling and management system will give us more structure. Gathering data and making data driven decisions will ensure an easier handling to the employees, too.”

Christian concludes: “goal is to increase capacities with automation and digitalisation, so we can produce more parts per unit at the same time.”