Minister President Dr Stoiber visits Brose

Last Wednesday, after five years of construction activities, the international automotive supplier Brose inaugurated the plant facilities at its founding location in Coburg. At the event, attended by numerous guests from industry, politics, associations and academia, Dr Edmund Stoiber, Bavaria’s Minister President, underlined the importance of innovative family-run companies for the German industry. “Brose is a top company worldwide”, said Stoiber.

Since 1998, Brose has invested some 200 million euro in its Coburg location where 2200 employees work. “The only way for us to ensure our competitiveness is to continuously optimize all our processes. That applies to both our products and our administration. This is the area where we particularly wanted to achieve a quantum leap in order to increase our efficiency and working speed,” said Michael Stoschek, President and CEO of the Brose Group. The company has completely restructured its founding location over the past five years. Old buildings underwent renovation, new ones were built. Back in 1988 the employees were spread out over 40 buildings at the location. Today 450 employees, who used to work at 12 different places, now work in the new research and development center.

Michael Stoschek explained that the modernization of all of the buildings facilitated a fundamental restructuring of the organization with regard to optimal processes, short ways and clear structures. To achieve this, Brose equipped old and new administrative and manufacturing buildings with state-of-the-art office, communication and manufacturing technology and created large, transparent rooms.

Julia Stoschek, Brose shareholder and great-granddaughter of the company’s founder, underlined the heavy responsibility the family had as shareholders toward the company and its employees. This is seen in the fact that a tenth of the annual surplus is the very maximum distributed to the shareholders.

Hans-Jürgen Warnecke, former President of the Frauenhofer Society and Chairman of the Brose supervisory board, used Brose as an example to illustrate the principles of a fractal company where the employees clearly have more responsibilities but at the same time very much more freedom than in conventional companies.

Rainer Thieme, Vice-President of the Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), congratulated the company on behalf of this particular industrial sector, praising the innovative “Brose Working World” as a model for the future of family-run companies. The flexible, non-hierarchical office concept in conjunction with state-of-the-art data communication and the variable working time meant greater customer satisfaction.