RK Rose+Krieger GmbH has been awarded the TOP 100 Award for the seventh time – honored by TOP 100-Mentor Ranga Yogeshwar

For the 25th time, the TOP 100 competition has honoured the most innova-tive of Germany’s small and medium-sized companies. This year, RK Rose+Krieger GmbH is once again amongst these innovative leaders. Prof. Dr Nikolaus Franke, the Scientific Director of TOP 100, came to this conclusion based on his analysis.

Ranga Yogeshwar, a mentor at TOP 100, will be honouring the company from Minden on 29 June 2018 at the award ceremony in Ludwigsburg, Germany, together with Prof. Dr Franke and compamedia, as part of the 5th German Summit for medium-sized companies. RK Rose+Krieger has now leapt into this Innovation Elite for the seventh time. The 230 strong company was found to have particularly impressive innovative processes in an independent selection process.

Colloquially, an innovation is often equated with a new idea that triggers a ground-breaking change. However, RK Rose+Krieger GmbH prefers to refer back to the Latin roots of the term, the verb “innovare”, which means “to renew”. This is exactly what this supplier of modules and components for industrial production and automation technology is tirelessly striving for – both with its end products and at every operational level.

RK Rose+Krieger GmbH has been awarded the TOP 100 Award for the seventh time

Patience and many small steps

“In this age of digital transformation and disruptive business models, the guiding force for our daily actions is success through continuous improvement,” says Managing Director Hartmut Hoffmann, describing his company’s strategy. He knows very well that it takes a lot of patience and many small steps for a company to be successful in the long term.

For example, Rose+Krieger shows patience with investments for the future, such as the “3F” optimisation project, which is scheduled to run for several years. Its objective is to harmonise the entire company’s data structure. The sheer volume of 190,000 delivery items recorded by the company each year illustrates the scale of the challenge.

Such complex schedules are managed by employees who are lean-management experts. Rose+Krieger has been working according to the Japanese management method since 2009. The company, a subsidiary of the internationally operating Phoenix Mecano AG, is now so well positioned in this field, that as a pioneer it has already trained over 100 employees  within this group of companies.

Managing Director Hartmut Hoffmann

Success is daily actions of continuous improvement

Rose+Krieger is able to take many steps on the long road to continuous improvement because its staff regularly contributes ideas. This is due to the trust that has grown from experience. Because even proposals that free up capacity in personnel do not lead to job losses, but rather serve to secure the future of the company. But it is also down to the common desire to strive to do everything better and better. Even something as small as changing the colour of the sleeves can be enough to make a difference. Since the many similar-looking, yet different recirculating ball screws have been marked with these sleeves, they have been mistaken for one another significantly less frequently. Hardly anyone would describe this simple but effective idea as innovative in the traditional sense. But all in all, it is precisely measures like these that make a telling contribution to the success of this company.

Small cause, big effect

OP 100: The competition

Back in 1993 compamedia began awarding the "Top 100" seal to SMEs which demonstrate particular innovation strength and out-standing innovative success. Since 2002, Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke from the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration has been this project's scientific head. Prof. Dr. Franke is one of the leading experts for user innovation in the world. The science journalist and TV presenter, Ranga Yogeshwar, is the "Top 100" project mentor. The Fraunhofer Society for the advancement of applied research acts as a partner to this project and the German business magazine "manager magazin" is the media partner. For more information, go to www.top100.de.