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The “Shaping the Future 2025” study by Staufen USA offers insights into how U.S. industrial companies are transforming through innovation and digital technologies.
For this study, a total of 280 industrial companies in the USA were surveyed in November 2024. The extra chapter in the “Shaping the Future 2025” study provides a comparison between the ASG region (Austria, Switzerland, and Germany) and the USA.

Do you want to remain competitive in an increasingly complex and innovative market environment?

Do you want to be able to cope with the exogenous factors that challenge your company every day, such as energy crises, technological innovations, supply chain difficulties?

Our Academy Program 2025 is for you!

To stay one step ahead of competitors, it is important for companies to continuously develop the skills and capabilities of employees.

STAUFEN.ITALIA’s training offerings help you enhance the skills of staff in all functions and at all hierarchical levels through courses geared toward:

✔️ Operational Excellence: factory layout, materials management, supply chain, …

✔️ More modern areas: digitization

✔️ Leadership Excellence: different and modern ways of managing people

To best support you on your path to excellence, our courses guarantee:

🔷 Qualified trainers

🔷 the right balance of theory and operations

🔷 various modes of delivery: in-house, at exemplary companies, remotely

🔷 direct comparison with companies that have successfully implemented Lean Transformation: our BestPractice Partners

As every year, we thank our BestPractice Partners and Academy Partners: Comac, Endress+Hauser Group, Fresenius Medical Care Italia, Lavazza Group, PAMA S.p.A., SEW-EURODRIVE Italia, Sidel.

Download the 2025 Training Program for free!

For further info: giulia.calcagno@staufen.it

Do you want to remain competitive in a highly demanding and rapidly changing market environment?

Do you want to be able to cope with the exogenous factors that challenge your company every day, such as energy crises, technological innovations, supply chain difficulties?

Our 2024 Academy Program is for you!

To stay one step ahead of competitors, it is important for companies to continuously develop the skills and capabilities of employees.

STAUFEN.ITALIA’s training offerings help you empower staff in all functions and at all hierarchical levels through courses aimed at:

• Operational Excellence: factory layout, materials management, digitization, supply chain, …
• Leadership Excellence: different and modern ways of managing personnel.

To best support you on your path to excellence, our courses guarantee:

• Qualified trainers
• The right balance of theory and operation
• Various modes of delivery: in-house, at exemplary companies, remotely
• Direct comparison with companies that have successfully implemented Lean Transformation: our BestPractice Partners

As every year, we thank our BestPractice Partners and Academy Partners: Autec, Bitron, Centro Carni Company, De Nora, Endress+Hauser, Fresenius, Lavazza, Pama, Saleri, Sew Eurodrive, Sidel.

For info: giulia.calcagno@staufen.it

Download the Academy Program 2024 for free!

Successful companies are future-oriented and anticipate major upheavals of tomorrow. With our magazine, we offer orientation and show how companies can overcome the challenges of widely diversified supply chains or the establishment of sustainable processes.

How managers, those responsible for personnel development, and employees work together to ensure effective training and development

The Staufen 2023 study “The Future of Training” reveals that employees, managers, and those responsible for professional development must work together to design a continuous learning process and advance further training and development effectively. 

GROW. PERFORM. TRANSFORM to peak performance

In today’s competitive environment, continuous learning and training have become essential for personal and professional development. Our white paper examines the importance of developing skills and how training programs can help people reach their full potential while helping the company remain ready for the future.

THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF COMPETITIVENESS

Becoming digital, efficient, sustainable, and resilient all at once is a major challenge for many companies today.

However, the Staufen “Future Industry” study shows that boards and management teams in industry have clearly set their strategic compass. The foundation for a sustainable, change-ready and resilient business is and will remain operational and digital excellence. When set up in this way, a multi-faceted challenge for a company can become a multi-faceted opportunity.

BOOSTING ROBUSTNESS, RESILIENCE AND RESPONSIVENESS

What does the stable supply chain network of tomorrow look like? Those who come out on top will be supply chain networks that at their core have three capabilities: Robustness, responsiveness and resilience.

All reconfiguration measures are geared towards strengthening these three capabilities. Companies then benefit from the fact that a robust network has suitable measures in place to protect them against events with a lower severity and enables continuous operation. The more responsive the network is, the quicker the company is capable of making suitable adjustments and to continue with the performance. 

COMPETITIVENESS AND FUTURE ASSURANCE

Heat records, forest fires, dried-up rivers and lakes — climate change caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can no longer be ignored. In Germany, industry is responsible for around one-fifth of GHG emissions. According to the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, two-thirds of these emissions are generated during energy production, while one-third is released during the manufacture of products in the metal and chemical industries, for example.

While such process-related emissions – methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases in addition to carbon dioxide (CO2) – are mostly unavoidable, the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and heat can very well be reduced or even completely avoided. This is the reason why the German government is pushing for the conversion to a climate-neutral industrialized country – across the entire value chain.

How to make the future happen

The question currently arises as to why the topic of strategy is just now gaining renewed attention among many companies. In our opinion, this is due to two developments: First, external influences such as political decisions or shorter technology cycles on companies and their market environment have significantly increased in strength and speed in recent years. As a result, the added value that companies create for their customers is coming under much more rapid and sustained pressure than it was a few years ago. Second, many companies are increasingly struggling to implement strategic initiatives. According to recent studies, the rate of ineffective strategic initiatives is around 50%. This represents a waste of resources that companies can no longer afford.

For companies, it follows from these two developments that they must implement excellent strategy development and deployment processes to ensure their long-term success in the marketplace.

Staufen AG has compiled the German Industry 4.0 Index every year since 2014. Thus, the metric is nearly as old as the term Industry 4.0 itself. The 2022 index indicates that the German economy is threatening to split down the middle. 2, the German Industry 4.0 Index was compiled as part of the study “Companies in Transformation.”

For this, we surveyed a total of 363 companies in Germany in the fall of 2021, a good two-thirds of whom are from the mechanical and plant engineering industry, the electrical industry, and the automotive sector. 

Apart from the large retail chains, the food sector in Germany is generally characterized by numerous small and medium-sized companies. Most of them have no experience with lean management to date. Producing small batches, delivering just-in-time and responding flexibly to customer wishes is therefore difficult for them to imagine.

Currently, the food industry is dominated by overproduction and excessive inventories. And that has a number of negative effects.

In mechanical engineering, experts currently see three megatrends, which must be combined at companies. Sustainability, digitalization, and systems engineering. According to expert opinions, in order to be able to guarantee comprehensive sustainability, mechanical engineering must work symbiotically with its customers. It is only possible to tackle systematic tasks such as the circular economy by uniting system builders and operators.

So that the green transformation succeeds, companies and their suppliers must cooperate more closely and increase their readiness for transformation. As the results of the study show, it’s likely that not all companies will succeed.

In order to stay one step ahead of the competition in the future, it is of fundamental importance for companies not only to continuously develop themselves, but also their own employees.

More than 100 experienced trainers and 70 international BestPractice partners support you in your individual training and development. We have set ourselves the goal of empowering our learners with new, high-quality learning formats where they want to be empowered: offline, online or blended!

Change Readiness Index 2022

The German economy is under continuing pressure to transform. Yet, the current Change Readiness Index shows that companies have only been able to increase their ability to change slightly in recent years, despite turbulent times. Many measures that had to be implemented at speed during the COVID-19 pandemic have so far quite obviously had no deep impact.

Processes, structures, employee qualifications, leadership and corporate culture – everything that has shaped companies to date continues to be put to the test. If companies want to emerge successfully from the transformation, they must look beyond acute challenges and work intensively on their ability to change

There’s no more hesitating when it comes to the green transformation – a harsh realization the industry has had to come to terms with. Companies like to believe they’re at an advantage over other industries. Yet, despite their marked success, the following still remains true: the automotive industry is not going to evolve into an exemplary green industry overnight. It’s a long – and, to a degree, also very arduous – process. However, increasingly stringent requirements and growing societal pressure have set a process in motion that is gradually but surely accelerating.

The path to emission- and CO2-free production will require the industry to reflect on their core strengths: an engineering spirit, courage, and commitment.

HOW COMPANIES ARE REALIZING THE BENEFITS OF DIGITIZATION

For companies, the focus of most digitization measures is on performance. Modern digital technologies for process automation help achieve this goal.

Increasing efficiency, achieving greater transparency and reducing costs – according to the Industry 4.0 Index surveyed by Staufen AG, the majority of companies primarily pursue these three goals with digitization. The means to achieve this are modern technologies that focus on simple implementation and application.

The Road to Success is a constant Construction Site

The spectrum of challenges to be mastered at the same time ranges from digitalization and corporate and leadership culture to cost and financing issues. Predictive restructuring is the key to ensuring that these factors that impact the success of a company do not turn into major construction sites that have to be managed simultaneously.

In essence, it is about establishing a clear process that holistically puts the future viability of their own company to the test. And to do so when there are no clearly visible cracks.

In our “Collaboration” study, we delved deeper into collaboration as a factor for success: We were curious about how companies organize collaboration in difficult times to stay on track. In cooperation with Valuestreamer, we surveyed 326 German companies in spring 2021. For international cross-comparison, companies from China, Brazil and Central Eastern Europe also participated in the survey.

Measures for optimization are mostly concentrated on internal processes. In contrast, the company’s own value-added network of increasingly numerous partners is far too rarely in focus. This is a mistake, because in crisis situations it becomes clear that numerous companies have to reconfigure their supply chain. We think holistically: classic supply chain management becomes supply chain network management.

What is the secret to long-term corporate success?

We have decoded the DNA of the model companies and our analysis has identified recurring parameters in these top enterprises. They can be bundled together to form the 7 characteristics of the world market leaders.

The potential for ecologically sustainable management has yet to be exhausted in the automotive industry Nine out of ten companies still have some catching up to do in this regard, as is clearly shown in the recent study “Green Transformation in the Automotive Industry”. To find out, the automotive experts at the management consultancy Staufen surveyed more than 250 OEMs and suppliers from the automotive industry in Germany.

A study from Staufen AG and Staufen Digital Neonex GmbH
For more than two decades, digitalization has been influencing our society, making everyday life much easier, speeding up our economy, and enabling new business models and sources of profit. Nevertheless, the power of persistence was previously much greater than the need to introduce long overdue change – precisely in processing industry….

As part of the German Industry 4.0 Index 2019, consulting firm Staufen AG and Staufen Digital Neonex GmbH surveyed a total of 323 companies in Germany on the topic of Industry 4.0 and digitization. The survey was conducted in July 2019. Nearly 70 percent of the companies surveyed are in the mechanical and plant engineering, electrical engineering, and automotive industries.

The Staufen business consultancy surveyed a total of 421 companies in Germany on the subject of “Success in Change” for the German “Change Readiness Index 2019.” The survey took place in the spring of 2019 and was conducted a second time in 2017.

A study from Staufen AG and Staufen Digital Neonex GmbH – For the “German Industry 4.0 Index 2018,” business consultancy Staufen AG and Staufen Digital Neonex GmbH surveyed a total of 450 companies in Germany on the topic of Industry 4.0. The survey was conducted in mid-2018. A good two thirds of the companies surveyed come from the mechanical and plant engineering, electrical engineering and automotive industries.

For the “Change Readiness Index 2017”, Staufen Consultancy surveyed a total of 658 companies in Germany on the topic of “Success in Transformation” in the spring of 2017. More than 60 percent of the companies surveyed are in the mechanical and plant engineering, electronics and automobile industries.

For the German Industry 4.0 Index 2017, Staufen AG, together with Staufen Digital Neonex GmbH, surveyed a total of 394 German companies. More than 70 percent of the companies surveyed were from the mechanical and plant engineering, automotive and electronics industry.

Study Infographic – German Industry 4.0 Index 2017 (German)

Cost considerations often play only a secondary role in purchasing for German manufacturers. Only 41% of companies with over 1,000 employees calculate a detailed total cost of ownership in selecting their suppliers. This figure is even lower among smaller companies — a mere 24%. Staufen polled over 100 manufacturing companies in Germany for this research.

The German Industry 4.0 Index grew for the second year in a row. In the meantime, four in ten companies have had direct experience with smart industry. The index, which was generated for the third time, was commissioned by Staufen and surveyed 277 businesses in Germany.

Failure to meet deadlines, going over budget, losses in quality — nearly four in ten development projects in German mechanical and plant engineering fail to meet their targets. This was the outcome of a study Staufen conducted jointly with Germany’s Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA). It appears that the principles of efficient and effective development projects are applied in a wide range of ways among German mechanical and plant engineers.

Manufacturing companies are anticipating changes due to I4.0: 57% of German manufacturers state that their business model will tangibly change within the next five years due to smart factories and connected products. This was the take-home message of the German Industry 4.0 Index, which Staufen conducted for the second time in 2015.

The German aviation industry will transfer more and more of its development and processing capacities to Asia in the years ahead. There is the threat of local plants closing, especially among the larger players in the field, according to the findings of the 2015 aviation study. Staufen and the German Aerospace Industries Association (BDLI) spoke to over 100 manufacturers in the German aviation industry.

In the meantime, half of all Chinese manufacturers have the topic of intelligent factories on their agenda. And 80% of Swiss manufacturing companies are convinced that Industry 4.0 will be linked to major commercial success for them, according to the findings of an international study entitled “Industry 4.0 Index 2015.” A total of 329 manufacturers in Switzerland, Germany and China were surveyed for the index, which was conducted in the summer of 2015.