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01.02.2021

One Finance highlights performance – and now it’s coming to the plants!

One of the key jobs of ONE FINANCE is identifying cost drivers. These will be easy to identify in the plants, thanks to the new plant performance bills/profit and loss account.

The plants are like DMK’s engine: They take in a valuable raw material, process and refine it and transform it into products. They are the heart of DMK but they are naturally also the company’s largest cost item. The One Finance program has now developed a tool to help make processes in the plants more profitable.

Transparency

Costs can only be saved by identifying cost drivers and for that, you need transparency. But how can we create transparency at our highly specialized plants and facilities? Through a set of key performance indicators that are standardized across DMK. That is the only way we can compare and steer performance better. Timo Voßmeyer‘s 10-member One Finance project team has redefined what our plants do. The profit-and-loss account measures the planned revenue for the products that are made, and subtracts the costs involved. To steer efficiently, it‘s important to be able to identify any divergence from the planned result and work out how that happened.

Differences

If a plant produces less than planned, for example because less is sold, its performance sinks, but this difference is not the facility‘s responsibility, but is due to sales. If production materials are cheaper than planned, a facility‘s performance improves, but this, in turn, is due to the purchasing department. Production problems would be an area of divergence that is due to the plant, and could mean production takes longer, resulting in high-er personnel and energy costs.

Results

Under the new system, such divergences would be quantified precisely, and the cause identified at a glance. The tool allows plant supervisors and managers to gain a monthly overview, and clarity about the right measures to take in order to improve performance.

Plant reporting

Timo Voßmeyer is rightly proud of his team‘s work. „We‘ve created a new tool, showing a plant‘s output, and that standardizes and provides transparency. It incorporates all the current plant controlling tools and brings them into a uniform system. And unifying reporting across DMK means we can present plant managers with monthly results from the beginning of 2021.“

CEO INGO MÜLLER

"As a former plant manager, I still feel really close to our plants. The new plant profit-and-loss account gives us an instrument that allows us to compare performance across DMK in a way that is transparent, enabling the management team and I to steer the company more easily."

ULF TABEL, PLANT MANAGER ZEVEN

"I can see much more quickly and easily what we need to do at our plant to improve our performance, thanks to the new plant profit-and-loss account."

KAI OSTERWALD, PLANT CONTROLLER FOR THE ZEVEN PLANT

"I’m looking forward to the introduction of the profit-and-loss account as it means we can clearly identify what influenced results and so can steer the plant better. For me as a plant controller, the tool makes the monthly analysis much easier and I can provide the plant manager with the data and reports much faster."