Dr Miele | THE KBBREVIEW INTERVIEW
The Miele Experience Centre in Edinburgh
you that next week’s delivery will be only one-tenth of what you were expecting or even less. So this is really difficult. We’re trying to manage demand by supplying all our sales subsidiaries in the same manner, but there are some things that are not available for 10 to 12 weeks, and there are other products that we can deliver [as normal]. Day-to-day it’s about optimising what is there and I must praise our production planners, because every morning they have to see what material is there and what we can produce. It’s a really difficult situation and it’s also quite difficult to say when this might finish. None of the global supply chains are working perfectly but hopefully in 2022 we will see an end to this situation.
Q: Effective communication of these problems to your dealers must be such a learning process for you? A: We have invested much more into our IT systems since this issue has emerged. Not just the central systems, but also across [our territories]. This gives us, for example, a much better understanding of the availability of products. This means we can have a much larger horizon and see the availability. I know a dealer is not paid if they don’t deliver the full project so we try to come up with alternative products and we have found many creative ways of helping them, but we can’t solve every problem. I even had a German friend call me asking if I could get a dishwasher for him. I called the German subsidiary and they said ‘even for you we don’t have any’. They didn’t have a single one left! I’ve never seen that situation before in my business life.
January 2022 ·
Q: What lessons have you learnt as a business and as a leader? A: You look at your business and all its suppliers and see where you can get a second source. We know much better now who the sub-suppliers are of our sub-suppliers. We really ventured out into all of our value streams to look at where we have potential risks, and we are now evaluating a strategy on how to avoid them. In some cases, it is financially feasible to have a second source of supply and in others it’s very difficult. We also must look at, for example, how much supply do we order. Is it three days? Five days? Ten days? For semiconductors, we have just said ‘whatever they have just buy them’. So the view on the business has changed, but the interesting thing is that although we have the operational efforts that are keeping us working 24/7, we are still
investing in new product lines. The
development team is working on the next generation, and this is very important. Although we have these difficulties right now, I am always there to say, ‘look ahead, what will be there in one, three, five or 10 years?’ We have to come up with great product ideas and I think we have some very good ideas in the drawer right now.
Q: Is this new Experience Centre part of ongoing growth plans in the UK? A: Absolutely. When we open an Experience Centre it’s not only about the sales from that location. People are attracted to the Miele brand, and we have a lot of visitors who have been sent by their own local dealer and that’s great of course, we just want to show people what’s possible. In a lot of countries, we’ve
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