Among many innovators from the software, energy, and pharmaceutical industry, a representative of mechanical engineering also made it to the list of 100 innovators. This person is not just anyone to us, but our Managing Director Technology, Mr. Johann Soder. As a creative destructor upholding the lean principle, and striving for interconnection of humans, things, processes, services, and data according to the idea of industry 4.0, he created a window to look into the future at the plant in Graben-Neudorf. With the Lean Sm@rt Factory, he has put industry 4.0 into practice, while others still talk about doing so. Self-organizing assistant systems serve the human workers – by supporting them during the assembly of products even in batch sizes as small as 1, while the costs are as low as for mass production.
The German magazine Handelsblatt collected The German top 100 innovators in the supplement to the weekend edition no. 55 (March 17/18/19, 2017). For the article, the editors had a look at a companies and institutions in all industry sectors. As a result, they collected an exciting variety of clever minds in Germany.