Siemens sticks to plan

It is all about having a plan and sticking to it.
From “The Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic to Siemens Chief Executive for Industrial Automation Systems Industry sector, Ralf-Michael Franke, they all have a plan to move forward.
In Rancic’s case, it was about having one major goal and quite a few smaller goals to meet along the way during his run up the ladder on the first year of the television show “The Apprentice” with Donald Trump, Rancic said during his keynote address today at the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit in Chicago. Rancic ended up winning and becoming Trump’s right hand man for a year.
Franke said during his keynote Siemens has a plan to make sure the company is moving forward not for the next quarter, but for the next 10 years or so in the complex automation environment.
“We cannot avoid complexity in the future,” Franke said. “We have to learn how to manage it.”
Part of that complexity is about reducing time to market. Franke sees cutting down on engineering time as a benefit to reducing time to market. After all, the faster you can get product to customers, the higher your chance of profitability.
“We have to go more and more toward the digital world and also the virtual world,” he said. “Engineers have to think this way in the future.”
Siemens also relies upon what it calls megatrends to be a guiding force for their future.
They see three megatrends as areas to focus their business: Urbanization, demographics and climate change, said Dennis Sadlowski, chief executive of Siemens Energy and Automation during his keynote this morning.
Urbanization is interesting as last year was the first year in a long time that people were moving back into cities. Their projection is by 2015, there will be 350 million people living in mega cities all over the world.
Demographics is simple. People are living longer as life expectancy has jumped to just over 80 years of age.
Climate change is also a megatrend and there is definitely a higher concentration of CO2 on Earth, Sadlowski said.
He added the company is jumping on those trends and positioning the company to help out and take advantage of the situation. “Energy is one of the hottest topics across the world today,” Sadlowski said. “There will be a 40% increase in worldwide energy demand in the next 25 years. Siemens is well positioned in the energy sector and making investments in alternative energy programs.”
“The one that is first to react to the market is the one that will make more money,” Franke said.
It’s all about having a plan.