Reorganization in Dinkelsbühl

WP-L in Dinkelsbühl stands for oven construction and thus for the WP Group’s origins with the legendary Matador. Following a recent period of quiet stability, the reorganized Dinkelsbühl company is now returning to the fray with renewed impetus.

+Anyone who knows the place will notice it at first glance. Things have happened in the old fabrication facilities on von-Raumer-Strasse in Dinkelsbühl. Production structures have been thoroughly reorganized and workflows optimized. The buildings are shared between oven construction, mechanical engineering and the technology center. All machining technology for the entire Group is dealt with by a sister company in Bielefeld.

Fabrication is divided into firstly machine construction, which produces dough dividers, bread rolls lines and vacuum conditioning plants, and secondly oven-building. The latter in turn comprises both the classical WP product range such as the Matador, Rototherm and instore ovens – recently available with fronts in various colors – and loader technology of the Ober type. Moreover, the Dinkelsbühl oven builders also fabricate all the tunnel ovens for the sister company WP-IB (Werner & Pfleiderer Industrial Bakery) in Tamm, BadenWürttemberg, and design and build the Megador, a multi-deck tunnel oven with optional cyclotherm or thermo-oil heating used by medium-sized and large chain-store operators for batch-wise or progressive baking of bread and bread rolls.

Three men are behind the Dinkelsbühl reorganization, two of whom bring many years of experience in oven and bakery machinery construction. Ing. Günther Fliszar has been CEO since early 2016, and responsible for sales, while Dr.-Ing. Christoph Adams has been Technical Director since the end of 2016 and Head of Development and Design. Joachim Scherff is the management team’s third man, and has been Service Director since July 2017. At one time this department was outsourced, but Scherff has now reintegrated it into the company and reorganized it as an independent department. Outsourcing had cost a lot of customer satisfaction, and rebuilding this is the top priority aim of the 40-strong team of technicians. Scherff says: “Service is now organized as a fully independent function, and the spare parts organization has been rebuilt and separated from the production parts warehouse. Clearly defined reorder points ensure stable spare parts availability. Within a few months we have achieved a situation in which more than half of all required spare parts are at customers’ premises within one day.” He enlarged the service workforce in parallel, and also the number of master bakers, which grew from four to six. Internationally, technicians are supported by the service staff of licensed dealerships. A preventive maintenance messages system like that already introduced by the two sister companies Haton and Kemper is scheduled to follow in 2018, and should help minimize plant and oven downtimes.

According to Günther Fliszar, reorganization was helped by the good revenues and sales trend in the past two years. Fliszar says “Revenues rose in 2016 and 2017 and are now considerably over the EUR 40m mark. Both years closed equally clearly in the black.” Above all, exports are going well, and 220 rack ovens were sold abroad in 2017 alone, around 100 more than in the previous year. The number of Ober plants sold in 2017 also doubled from two to four. Fliszar says the growth in the machinery business looked even better than in oven-building. That seems likely to continue, and the total length of the order books for tunnel oven production in 2018 is already 25% greater compared to the year just ended.

To cope with all this, EUR 1.5m was invested in Dinkelsbühl in 2017, new designers were hired, and networking of the design departments with those of sister companies in the Group is being pushed forward. In all, there are 30 new jobs in Dinkelsbühl and, according to Fliszar, these jobs can be filled. “The job applications position in the region is good.”

Together with colleagues in the Group, the CEO is currently working to combine the entire artisan products business under a new umbrella brand. WP-L will then be the main supplier, while the sister companies Kemper and Haton will focus their new developments towards industrial businesses. The implementation timeline is aimed at the iba trade fair in the fall of 2018.

Some more product development is also planned before then. According to Dr. Adams, although the Rototherm rack oven has already been energetically re-engineered to make it “operate with 28% greater energy efficiency compared to pre-2015 models, we are looking at new functions and integrations.” One of these ideas is to upgrade the Rototherm to create an oven in which artisan businesses can also bake pan bread as well as the usual tray-baked products, thus using premium qualities to partly retrieve lost revenues.

Push-through rack ovens are also being discussed again, this time as an automated version that outputs its products into germ-reduced rooms. Fliszar and Adams can imagine automated combinations, with both industrial ovens and with artisan oven batteries, as a vacuum conditioning system with fast cooling and simultaneous stabilization of the baked product structures.

A program to promote cleaning and compliance with hygiene standards is already in the implementation phase. In the latest generation of instore ovens, the glass panes can simply be removed from the door and cleaned in a dishwasher. Moreover, the proofer interiors consist of a seamless, nonscratch plastic compartment from which only the baking tray supports are pulled out for cleaning.

The previous single touch-panel controller on the Matador has been replaced by one panel for each hearth, which are even easier to operate but can also be centrally controlled. The controllers also display real video clips that give detailed guidance to even an unskilled operator as to how individual job steps are carried out, e.g. cutting/scoring or strewing, and when and how to carry out cleaning.

Less than eight months remain until the iba trade fair in Munich, and Fliszar and Adams are absolutely determined to use it as an opportunity to show what is possible in Dinkelsbühl. +++