Headline November 18, 2016/ ''' MANUFACTURING - * MASTERLY * : GERMANY '''

''' MANUFACTURING - * MASTERLY * :

 GERMANY '''

FEW COUNTRIES IN the entire world, have the capability and an accomplished  mastery in manufacturing as good as,  Master Germany.

Manufacturing is not as easy as it looks or seems to the world. Without a word of exaggeration, over many many decades, say,  just about nearing a century:

*The World has watched Germany produce, works of great manufacturing as art, as simple beauty, and of course,  super functionality*.

JUST IMAGINE THIS :  *German manufacturing companies  valuations Might in......*Billions of Dollars* :

.- Daimler 100

.- Siemens 96

.- BMW 78

.- Volkswagen 66

.- Continental 44

.- Thyssen Krupp 20.

It honours bearing and  repeating this point as insight, once again:

FIRST,  platforms thrive when other firms,  developers and customers make use of them. Most big IT companies have grown up managing such ''ecosystems'', but this will not come easy to manufacturers.

SECOND, successful platforms tend to be  ''open'',  meaning chiefly that their owners encourage other firms, including competitors, to build applications that run on them.

Bosch, Trumpf, Siemens and others claim to be open, but it is not clear how welcoming they will be in practice. 

German bosses tend to think that they can offer all the necessary themselves and do not like the idea of inviting others on to their platform. 

German carmakers could probably build the dominant operating system for vehicles if they overcame their rivalries. But it is unclear whether BMW, 

Daimler and  VW's Audi  subsidiary will turn Here, the digital-maps business they are buying from Nokia, into a bona fide platform.

Such proprietary thinking also makes German industrial firms reluctant to produce open-source software to give away other forms of intellectual property-

In the way that  Tesla,  an American maker of electric cars, has done with its patents in an effort to spread its technology.

THIRD, platforms are about sharing the data they gather. The best new services are often the result of combining information from different sources. But in Germany that can be difficult.

One barrier is privacy, in addition to the country's strict data-protection laws, there is a widespread suspicion of anything that smacks of monetising data. 

Even among younger Germans, nearly two-thirds worry that data generated by their cars will be sold on according to research study be Deloitte, a consulting firm.

Many Germans are wary of what has come to be called....  *Platttform Kapitalismus*,  meaning the dominance of new markets by mighty foreign providers such as Google and Facebook.

This is seen as somehow unfair and an example of  American ''cowboy capitalism'', which adds to the reluctance of German firms to create and promote their own platforms.

Mittelstand firms too are reluctant to share data: they fear they could lose control of their intellectual property and this their competitive edge.

A FOURTH  and final battle relates to  German corporate culture. Although German firms are no longer as hierarchical as they once were, they are still managed from the top down; risk taking is discouraged.

A key to developing successful platforms and services is to put them in the hands of autonomous teams   -rather like internal startups  -and to be prepared to shut projects down if they fail to take off.

Many German giants now have  ''accelerators''  to incubate new business ideas., but lots are just public relations exercises. 

Only a few have gone as Klockner, which has set up an incubator for internal startups, in Berlin, far away from its headquarters in Duisberg, with the aim to digitising the firm's entire supply chain.

But many, many employees are not ready for the digital world.

So, is it the right time now, maybe, to ask, Does Deutschland do Digital? Europe's biggest economy is rightly worried that digitisation is a threat to its outstanding  industrial leadership. 

The Honour and Serving of the latest Operational research on Germany's Manufacturing Mastery continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing forward, and see you on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! the Ecosystem 2011:

''' World Focused '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless