In spring of 2009, my boss at the time came to me and put a piece of paper on my desk. On the piece of paper he had written “1969”. The year of the first moon landing.
“Do you think anyone believed it would work back then?” he asked me. “That’s exactly how it is with standardizing processes across multiple sites. – Let’s make the impossible possible.”
With that, he had me. My ambition was awakened and an incredible journey began.
In the evening, I sat down on our sofa and googled “process standardization”. I found what I was looking for at the chair of Prof. Dr. Tim Weitzel at the University of Bamberg, who was researching on process standardization.
An initial phone call followed shortly after, and then a historic conference call. Yes, by phone, without video. It was 2009.
Prof. Dr. Weitzel sick at home, his then assistant professor and the PhD student at a pizzeria at Frankfurt airport and my boss and I in Hamburg in the office, as we were offloaded from the flight to FRA. – Unfortunately, that’s how it is sometimes in the life of an airliner.
The result of the meeting was the beginning of a year-long research cooperation with the University of Bamberg, which helped us not only to solve the problem of process standardization, but to bring us to the forefront of process management development.
In the latest episode of the New Process Podcast, I discuss how we succeeded in doing this and how you can make use of it, too, with Prof. Dr. Daniel Beimborn, who was present at the meeting as an assistant professor at the time, accompanied us for years and now holds a chair at the University of Bamberg himself.
By the way, my boss at the time was Michael Bögle, whom I already talked to in episode 6. If you haven’t heard it yet, you can also find his experiences from the cooperation there.
