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Dräger Medical Group - Restructuring program for sweeping cost savings, process optimization and volume increases / DM 250 million productivity gains targeted
As announced by Drägerwerk AG, Lübeck, following its ad hoc notification of the evening of October 4, 2000, and already indicated at the stockholders' meeting last June, Dräger Medizintechnik GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary and parent of the Dräger Medical Group, Drägerwerk AG's biggest division, is planning an all-out restructuring program for improving efficiency and earnings for the Dräger Medical Group.
"Equal ranking priorities within this altogether DM 250 million productivity im-provement program (scheduled over a span of three years) are consistent cost reductions, optimized work flows throughout all departments and a significant increase in volumes in equipment business as well as data management and services in the midterm. The Medical Group will once again turn into an impres-sive source of earnings within the Dräger Group and a pleasure not only for our customers but our stockholders, too," says Dr. Wolfgang Reim, the newly ap-pointed Executive Board member in charge of the Medical Group. "With the aid of this new program, Dräger intends not only to maintain its technological su-premacy but also through cost leadership, further expand its international mar-ket position. The vast majority of jobs are safe and through this refocusing, the basis will be laid for further growth in the fiercely competitive international health market."
The cost-slashing program comprises the following eight items:
(1) Streamline administrative and support/service functions at the German sales branches and the Lübeck headquarters.
(2) Simplify the global management and organization structure in order to reduce complexity and optimize work flows worldwide (e.g., instead of eight only five international sales regions).
(3) Cut working capital by 30 percent.
(4) Quicken the transformation from a supplier of hardware to a foremost systems provider adept in services and problem-solving.
(5) Improve processes and step up the application of e-commerce (e.g., in the fields of purchase, logistics, and marketing).
(6) Prioritize those businesses in which the Dräger Medical Group is either market leader or runner-up, or alternatively shed low-profit market seg-ments (e.g., Dräger MST GmbH, Wiesbaden, and its modular hospital container construction), or alternatively move into strategic alliances.
(7) Introduce organizational measures for facilitating intragroup knowledge transfer and bundling know-how within the Dräger Group. For example the Data Management unit will be run as a new sector with headquarters and responsibility in the United States, and the separate German R&D locations in Essen and Kiel will be discontinued.
(8) Chain management compensation systems even more tightly to bottom line and cost of capital indicators.

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(c) Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, 2007      

Contact
Burkard Dillig
Spokesman
Phone +49 (0)451 882-2185
Fax +49 (0)451 882-3944
burkard.dillig@draeger.com