Operational Excellence
Oerlikon recognizes that achieving operational excellence does much more than just optimizing the short term performance of the company; it changes people’s minds, creates a safer, more productive workplace, contributes to bottom-line value creation and helps to shape the company transformation. Group-wide, Oerlikon Operational Excellence (OOE) is a standardized system that follows a 5-Year plan with Hoshin-Kanri strategy development, designed to strengthen the organization over the medium to long term. OOE focuses on optimizing operational performance in order to achieve sustained world-class status in manufacturing. The mission is to create a culture of data-driven innovation and improvements across all levels, with a strong focus on lean management, Six Sigma methods and empowerment of our employees. In recent years, the program has already improved efficiency, productivity, the safety awareness throughout the entire organization, and reduced energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
World-Class Manufacturing
To ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction, Oerlikon provides best in class quality products and services driven by efficient and economically sound manufacturing.
Key highlights in 2021:
- Global OOE assessment initiative: To increase the OOE maturity level at the sites, the OOE community rolled out a global initiative that allows the organization to get a quick update on the maturity level. The initiative supports immediate best practice sharing and culture change on a global level.
- Lean management/Six Sigma training: Numerous advanced online and face-to-face training sessions were started to ensure company needs. The scope included lean management training and tools support, as well as Six Sigma Green Belt training for practitioners supplemented by project work to achieve customer expectation. Moreover, Oerlikon conducted a follow-up with one-on-one support and webinars to support the cultural change program implemented across the company.
World-Class Supply Chain Management
- Continued focus on strengthening the reliability of the supply chain. New challenges arising due to the COVID-19 pandemic were mitigated by vigilantly monitoring supplier development.
- Promptly managed global price inflation, especially for raw materials and components. Mitigation actions were put in place at the beginning of 2021, thus avoiding large amounts of surplus costs.
- By continuing and improving risk management efforts through the COVID-19 task force, the organization succeeded in developing strategies for medium- and long-term emergency scenarios, with a focus on supplier financial risk mitigation and material allocation.
- Strengthening e-procurement and process automation initiatives across the business, improving performance, cost-efficiency and transparency thanks to a decisive focus on digitalization and artificial intelligence solutions.
- Actively addressed sustainability in the supply chain and have established a partnership with EcoVadis to increase the transparency in the area of sustainability across the strategic suppliers landscape.
Environment
In 2021, Oerlikon made good progress on its environmental targets. Energy management systems (EnMS) were implemented at a number of new sites, including the top energy usage sites, which together account for 50% of Oerlikon’s total energy consumption. The share of disposed waste was reduced in 2021 compared to the 2019 baseline.
The Group has set-up the process and methodology to consolidate and report on the share of electricity from renewable sources and the share of its R&D investment in sustainable products based on the newly defined sustainability criteria for products. Moreover, the Group has started the project to define Scope 3 emissions.
For further details on the company’s operational, supply chain and environment initiatives, actions and progress, see Oerlikon’s 2021 Sustainability Report.
