It was a wild and enlightening five days in Europe – from the shop floor to the board room. I was there visiting our office in Germany, and we focused on 16 organizations in all, digging in and exploring their opportunities and challenges.

LSPs, manufacturers and distribution companies: It encompassed a wide cross section of companies from cosmetics, to washing machines, diesel engines to automobiles. I see the major challenges in Central Europe now to be the global economy and slow sales (of course), reducing working capital, supplier relations, cost reduction, supply chain optimization, merger and acquisition integration, etc. Amazingly, with only four exceptions, the meetings across Central Europe were identical to the meetings I have in North America.

However, I found four interesting exceptions that reflect basic differences in our view of business and the fact that we have something to learn from these differences:

1) Benchmarking and Best Practices

I noticed a European lack of sophistication on Benchmarking and Best Practices (B&BP) thinking. Very little participation in B&BP was found, and what was found was driven by financial benchmarks as opposed to operational B&BP. Also surprising was the lack of connection of using benchmarking as a guide to identify appropriate best practices to be implemented. Central Europe has a clear focus on continuous improvement, but a very cloudy focus on breakthrough transformations.

2) Change Management

The second variation that I noted between North America and Central Europe was the topic of change management. Overall, the European view of change management is much more evolutionary then revolutionary. The European view is to evolve from a very good operation to one that is even better – not through a stepwise transformation but rather through the evolution of continuous improvement.

3) Quality

The third difference relates to the enhanced importance in Central Europe on quality. Manufacturing quality vs. low cost country (LCCs) sourcing was a very active topic of discussion. In North America, this discussion is much less frequent since sourcing from LCCs is a given as opposed to the quality debate continuing. Two big observations here: first, North America has a more developed process for manufacturing outsourcing; second, Central Europe really does a great job on high quality manufacturing. So, Europe fully accepts LCC sourcing for underwear and athletic shoes, but for precision tools and equipment, they prefer the quality of "Made in Germany."

4) Real-time Control

Lastly, a difference that I expected to find and did was the prevalence of worldwide ERP systems, but I did not fully expect the inappropriate use of these ERP systems to drive real-time process control in manufacturing and distribution. Without a real-time process layer of middleware between the ERP and the equipment controllers, I saw several systems that had too much equipment and not enough immediate control and flexibility. In North America, we prefer to have more thought and less steel. And certainly, this provides us with flexibility not available in Central Europe with their harder automation.

It’s also interesting to categorize these four differences into two groups. The first group combines differences 1 and 2 and says that North America needs to enhance their thinking on continuous improvement and Central Europe should do the same on breakthrough transformations. The second group combines differences 3 and 4 and says that North America needs to return to an enhanced focus on quality, whereas Central Europe needs to enhance their middleware capabilities.

So, I had a great week of sharing various ways of thinking on supply chain and manufacturing. It is clear that with 90% of the issues being identical, the marketplace is global. Although there are some small differences, for the most part business in Central Europe is very much like business in North America. It will be interesting to see how both evolve in the next decade.