Bernd Schreiber
Bernd combines broad, cross-sector industry experience with deep expertise in strategy and operations to help clients transform and achieve best-in-class performance.
Areas of Focus
Education
Cooperative State University of Baden Wuerttemberg
Business Administration
Bernd is Partner based in our Frankfurt office and leads Arthur D. Little’s global Operations Management practice. He also leads our global Industry 4.0 activities and is member of our Digital Transformation & Analytics think tank.
His main areas of expertise cover strategy definition, operating model and organizational design, operational excellence, supply chain management, performance improvement, and transformation programs in a wide variety of industries. With his projects, Bernd helps our clients to anticipate future trends in operations. He designs innovative solutions and helps to transform businesses towards performance excellence across the value chain.
For example, he has helped leading companies in automotive, transportation, energy and other industries to apply Industry 4.0 and digital technologies in operations to achieve quantum-leap efficiency gains, and as well as assisting them in generating value out of data. Applying digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, bots, collaborative robots, augmented reality, blockchain and additive manufacturing allows for EBIT improvement from 30% to 50%. Bernd has also helped various clients in transforming their supply chains and procurement from transaction-oriented units to value-generating functions, which delivers strategic impact for the companies’ competiveness.
Bernd has published our viewpoints in operations such as the “Future of Operations in the Digital World”, “Procurement 4.0”, and “Radical Simplification”. He is responsible for our flagship operations benchmark in procurement, supply chain and manufacturing.
Prior to joining Arthur D. Little, Bernd worked for 7 years in manufacturing companies in finance, controlling and supply chain management.
Bernd is married, has two beautiful kids and enjoys family life in a fantastic and traditional wine region in Germany. Being a former enthusiastic handball player, Bernd experienced and believes in the success of team and fair play.
The Industrial Metaverse
Building a sustainable & highly productive supply chain
Supply chains are under unprecedented strain, impacting productivity and leading to shortages for consumers and manufacturers alike. At the same time, companies face growing pressure from society and regulators to become more sustainable, which opens up new opportunities with customers increasingly willing to pay a premium for more sustainable products. Meeting these conflicting objectives requires a comprehensive approach that future-proofs supply chains by delivering both greater sustainability and higher productivity.
Embracing the telco productivity race
Improving productivity is a critical element of the journey telcos must take to become ambidextrous — and improving productivity is about going way beyond cost-cutting. In this Viewpoint, we discuss a transformative approach that we call the “Productivity RACE” (Radical, Accelerated, Continuous, and Effective). This framework sets out to improve and sustain business productivity, while addressing commonly observed challenges and barriers to successful execution of productivity measures.
Achieving resilience and sustainability for the EV battery supply chain
However, battery supply chains remain complex, global, and fragile, with many still evolving from scratch. Their resilience is impacted by a growing number of factors, from rising raw material costs to geopolitical disruption. Average battery pack prices have risen in 2022, the first increase since 2013. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns, greater regulation, and governments’ desire to localize battery production add to pressure on already-stretched global supply chains. All of these factors lead to potential bottlenecks that affect production.
Reimagining India’s supply chain
It’s time for a supply chain recalibration
The recent economic turmoil surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have exposed the vulnerabilities of today’s complex supply chain networks, challenging many industries across the globe. Companies have learned the hard lessons of underestimating supply and demand volatility risks, raising questions around control, transparency, and regionalization. Supply chain resilience has risen to the top of the executive agenda, and it is now time to transfer lessons learned into action to prepare businesses for future disruptions.
The sustainable and highly productive supply chain
At the same time, national and international sustainability laws and initiatives require a fundamental shift within global supply chains. It is clear that organizations require a strategic framework that supports decision makers in creating supply chain value by synchronizing supply chain layers beyond short-term and reactive crisis management.
Integrated planning in metals & mining
Over the past decade, heavily invested projects from metals, mining, and other industrial companies have transformed and optimized functional processes – standardizing operations within ERP systems and enriching systems with data through modern digital tools. Such key functional area optimization produced solid economic benefits. Opportunities for more value remain via optimal interfaces between different functions that, locally optimized, are still siloed and do not provide substantial productivity improvement.
Extracting network operations efficiency in the post-COVID-19 era
How telecom operators can overcome complexity and demand challenges
Public procurement transformation in the GCC region – post-COVID-19 era
Actions for post-crisis supply chain recovery
Every day more countries alarm the world with new COVID-19 cases. As a result, many countries are closing their borders and imposing social-distancing measures on their people. Naturally, global and local companies are affected as their workforces and supply chains are cut off. The first weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak showed organizations’ ability to pull out well-prepared contingency plans to respond and adapt to the new reality quickly.
The 5F War Room
Businesses worldwide are facing unprecedented challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. The paramount need is to secure health and safety for the workforce, clients and our societies at large. Beyond that, impact on demand is brutal, with companies forced to juggle major downturns and upturns for products and services. In addition, companies need to be ready to stage recoveries once the crisis de-escalates (ideally within the next two to five months, depending on sectors that move at different speeds).
Nuclear Lean
Nuclear power plant owners are hesitant to pursue life extension projects, and in some cases, are even shutting down their plants. As plants age and safety requirements inflate costs of life extension projects, nuclear plant owners often do not find these projects an attractive business case. This, combined with lack of political support, fear of national nuclear phaseouts, and competition from other (often renewable) energy sources, has forced the premature shutdown of several nuclear plants across the world. Arthur D.
RPA: Robotic Process Automation
Executive Briefing Series
An 8-part series to be updated weekly from July to September 2019
RPA is changing the way processes are automated. In the following guide we will give insights what RPA is, what can be expected by RPA – now and in future - and how to enable a fast operationalization and scaling of process automation by RPA.
Operations Management Periodical
Mit dem Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) der Berner Gruppe haben wir ein Interview zur Zukunft der Logistik geführt. Die Berner Gruppe handelt B2B mit Verbrauchsmaterialien, Werkzeugen und Werkstattausstattung und bietet entsprechende Beratung und Serviceleistungen an. Die Gruppe ist europaweit in mehr als 25 Ländern aktiv. Eine der wesentlichen Erkenntnisse ist, dass die Digitalisierung die Logistik in den nächsten Jahren radikal verändern wird - nicht nur in den eigenen Abläufen, sondern auch in der einhergehenden Veränderung des Geschäftsmodells.
Seven value drivers for the future of procurement
How can Arthur D.Little support ?
Assess potential and develop concepts
Understand industry trends and derive future implications
Assess maturity level and identify opportunities
Develop target picture and design pilot projects
Develop transformation roadmap
Transform the organization and implement pilots
Reimagining telco operations in a hyper-digital world
Organizations in today’s digital age are witnessing technology trends that are profoundly reshaping value chains across industries. Digitalization is an all-pervasive trend acting as the disruptor-in-chief of business and operating models across converging industries. The telecom industry, which is at the heart of the digitalization megatrend and a key digitalization enabler, is not immune to this disruption.
Integrating lean principles into digital transformation
With the advent of digital, many organizations are looking to move away from lean management, in search of more radical performance gains. This article explains why lean principles are still vital, and how integrating them into digital transformation can be a highly effective way of simplifying the process. This allows companies to identify and apply the most effective levers for the digital journey.
Logistics 4.0 – Facing digitalization- driven disruption
At a time of market transformation, legacy logistics players (LLPs) risk being held back by the weight of their past, with static organizations, old IT systems, and complex processes preventing them from competing. As Logistics 4.0 becomes a reality, how can LLPs set their future strategies and ensure they are focusing on the right areas to become digital champions? This article sets out a potential framework that players can use to manage competing priorities and ensure that investments deliver digital transformation.
Beyond the best network operations!
Current international industry trends predict mid-term reductions of profitability margins for telecom operators, in particularfor mature markets. This is a result of huge investments (GSMA estimates that telecom operators will invest $1.7 trillionon capex during 2014-2020) that are required to build next-generation networks in order to satisfy the data- demandexplosion and revenue reduction caused by mobile price wars and competition from OTT.
Procurement 4.0 in the digital world
The world is changing: decreasing levels of in-house value-add and increasing speed of market and technological changes require procurement to transform into an agile, linked innovation leader and real-time, integrated supply-chain manager.
Outsourcing model redesign
Outsourcing has been widely implemented in all industries. While some of these partnerships have failed miserably, others were perceived as successful. The aspired advantages, such as cost savings, flexibility and access to innovation, have often turned into dependency and inability to get the full value of the relationship. Taking a fresh look can provide the opportunity to transform the operational as well as the contractual set-up and to radically increase the value.
Digital Transformation
Turning digital has become a well-understood imperative. Although digital has commonly found its way into corporate strategies, the path to transforming adequately remains unspecified.
Future of Operations in the digital world
Industry 4.0 and the related new technologies, such as the “Internet of Things”, “cyber-physical systems” and “additive manufacturing”, will drive radical performance improvements in terms of cost and customer excitement. CxOs in all industries are currently defining their ways to explore and exploit the benefits. The bad news is that the variety of technologies and limited number of industrialized examples make it hard to understand the complexity of the topic.
How to start off with "Industry 4.0" now!
"Industry 4.0" is currently on everyone’s lips. Which topics are just hyped? Which technologies have real value for the operations of your company? How, where and when should you implement them to gain profits in the short and long terms? Although the complexity of the questions is high, it is not advisable to wait. Pioneers can gain significant competitive advantage in the short term by following the right approach.
Managing Global Production Networks
Global megatrends create transformation pressure on the manufacturing industry and their global production networks. Our recent study on “Managing global production networks” analyzed how companies are achieving high performing production networks e.g. by managing network goals, network structure and network coordination. It became obvious that today’s global competition requires companies to strengthen network capabilities vs. a site capabilities and are able to constantly evolve the network design to respond to the dynamic market in an agile way.
Anticipating the Operations of the Future
During the last decade business operations have been transformed in a way that has never been seen before. What does the future hold for operations management and how can it react to ever accelerating change? In this brief article the authors take a quick look at some of the likely characteristics of the operations of the future, and how operational leaders can best respond.
Hitting the Bulls-Eye: Value Sourcing
The traditional procurement model does not help organizations achieve additional and sustainable financial targets. The CFO is asked to use the procurement department as an internal value partner to address and discuss new ways of spending the budget; often called value sourcing.
Bernd is Partner based in our Frankfurt office and leads Arthur D. Little’s global Operations Management practice. He also leads our global Industry 4.0 activities and is member of our Digital Transformation & Analytics think tank.
His main areas of expertise cover strategy definition, operating model and organizational design, operational excellence, supply chain management, performance improvement, and transformation programs in a wide variety of industries. With his projects, Bernd helps our clients to anticipate future trends in operations. He designs innovative solutions and helps to transform businesses towards performance excellence across the value chain.
For example, he has helped leading companies in automotive, transportation, energy and other industries to apply Industry 4.0 and digital technologies in operations to achieve quantum-leap efficiency gains, and as well as assisting them in generating value out of data. Applying digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, bots, collaborative robots, augmented reality, blockchain and additive manufacturing allows for EBIT improvement from 30% to 50%. Bernd has also helped various clients in transforming their supply chains and procurement from transaction-oriented units to value-generating functions, which delivers strategic impact for the companies’ competiveness.
Bernd has published our viewpoints in operations such as the “Future of Operations in the Digital World”, “Procurement 4.0”, and “Radical Simplification”. He is responsible for our flagship operations benchmark in procurement, supply chain and manufacturing.
Prior to joining Arthur D. Little, Bernd worked for 7 years in manufacturing companies in finance, controlling and supply chain management.
Bernd is married, has two beautiful kids and enjoys family life in a fantastic and traditional wine region in Germany. Being a former enthusiastic handball player, Bernd experienced and believes in the success of team and fair play.
The Industrial Metaverse
Building a sustainable & highly productive supply chain
Supply chains are under unprecedented strain, impacting productivity and leading to shortages for consumers and manufacturers alike. At the same time, companies face growing pressure from society and regulators to become more sustainable, which opens up new opportunities with customers increasingly willing to pay a premium for more sustainable products. Meeting these conflicting objectives requires a comprehensive approach that future-proofs supply chains by delivering both greater sustainability and higher productivity.
Embracing the telco productivity race
Improving productivity is a critical element of the journey telcos must take to become ambidextrous — and improving productivity is about going way beyond cost-cutting. In this Viewpoint, we discuss a transformative approach that we call the “Productivity RACE” (Radical, Accelerated, Continuous, and Effective). This framework sets out to improve and sustain business productivity, while addressing commonly observed challenges and barriers to successful execution of productivity measures.
Achieving resilience and sustainability for the EV battery supply chain
However, battery supply chains remain complex, global, and fragile, with many still evolving from scratch. Their resilience is impacted by a growing number of factors, from rising raw material costs to geopolitical disruption. Average battery pack prices have risen in 2022, the first increase since 2013. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns, greater regulation, and governments’ desire to localize battery production add to pressure on already-stretched global supply chains. All of these factors lead to potential bottlenecks that affect production.
Reimagining India’s supply chain
It’s time for a supply chain recalibration
The recent economic turmoil surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have exposed the vulnerabilities of today’s complex supply chain networks, challenging many industries across the globe. Companies have learned the hard lessons of underestimating supply and demand volatility risks, raising questions around control, transparency, and regionalization. Supply chain resilience has risen to the top of the executive agenda, and it is now time to transfer lessons learned into action to prepare businesses for future disruptions.
The sustainable and highly productive supply chain
At the same time, national and international sustainability laws and initiatives require a fundamental shift within global supply chains. It is clear that organizations require a strategic framework that supports decision makers in creating supply chain value by synchronizing supply chain layers beyond short-term and reactive crisis management.
Integrated planning in metals & mining
Over the past decade, heavily invested projects from metals, mining, and other industrial companies have transformed and optimized functional processes – standardizing operations within ERP systems and enriching systems with data through modern digital tools. Such key functional area optimization produced solid economic benefits. Opportunities for more value remain via optimal interfaces between different functions that, locally optimized, are still siloed and do not provide substantial productivity improvement.
Extracting network operations efficiency in the post-COVID-19 era
How telecom operators can overcome complexity and demand challenges
Public procurement transformation in the GCC region – post-COVID-19 era
Actions for post-crisis supply chain recovery
Every day more countries alarm the world with new COVID-19 cases. As a result, many countries are closing their borders and imposing social-distancing measures on their people. Naturally, global and local companies are affected as their workforces and supply chains are cut off. The first weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak showed organizations’ ability to pull out well-prepared contingency plans to respond and adapt to the new reality quickly.
The 5F War Room
Businesses worldwide are facing unprecedented challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. The paramount need is to secure health and safety for the workforce, clients and our societies at large. Beyond that, impact on demand is brutal, with companies forced to juggle major downturns and upturns for products and services. In addition, companies need to be ready to stage recoveries once the crisis de-escalates (ideally within the next two to five months, depending on sectors that move at different speeds).
Nuclear Lean
Nuclear power plant owners are hesitant to pursue life extension projects, and in some cases, are even shutting down their plants. As plants age and safety requirements inflate costs of life extension projects, nuclear plant owners often do not find these projects an attractive business case. This, combined with lack of political support, fear of national nuclear phaseouts, and competition from other (often renewable) energy sources, has forced the premature shutdown of several nuclear plants across the world. Arthur D.
RPA: Robotic Process Automation
Executive Briefing Series
An 8-part series to be updated weekly from July to September 2019
RPA is changing the way processes are automated. In the following guide we will give insights what RPA is, what can be expected by RPA – now and in future - and how to enable a fast operationalization and scaling of process automation by RPA.
Operations Management Periodical
Mit dem Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) der Berner Gruppe haben wir ein Interview zur Zukunft der Logistik geführt. Die Berner Gruppe handelt B2B mit Verbrauchsmaterialien, Werkzeugen und Werkstattausstattung und bietet entsprechende Beratung und Serviceleistungen an. Die Gruppe ist europaweit in mehr als 25 Ländern aktiv. Eine der wesentlichen Erkenntnisse ist, dass die Digitalisierung die Logistik in den nächsten Jahren radikal verändern wird - nicht nur in den eigenen Abläufen, sondern auch in der einhergehenden Veränderung des Geschäftsmodells.
Seven value drivers for the future of procurement
How can Arthur D.Little support ?
Assess potential and develop concepts
Understand industry trends and derive future implications
Assess maturity level and identify opportunities
Develop target picture and design pilot projects
Develop transformation roadmap
Transform the organization and implement pilots
Reimagining telco operations in a hyper-digital world
Organizations in today’s digital age are witnessing technology trends that are profoundly reshaping value chains across industries. Digitalization is an all-pervasive trend acting as the disruptor-in-chief of business and operating models across converging industries. The telecom industry, which is at the heart of the digitalization megatrend and a key digitalization enabler, is not immune to this disruption.
Integrating lean principles into digital transformation
With the advent of digital, many organizations are looking to move away from lean management, in search of more radical performance gains. This article explains why lean principles are still vital, and how integrating them into digital transformation can be a highly effective way of simplifying the process. This allows companies to identify and apply the most effective levers for the digital journey.
Logistics 4.0 – Facing digitalization- driven disruption
At a time of market transformation, legacy logistics players (LLPs) risk being held back by the weight of their past, with static organizations, old IT systems, and complex processes preventing them from competing. As Logistics 4.0 becomes a reality, how can LLPs set their future strategies and ensure they are focusing on the right areas to become digital champions? This article sets out a potential framework that players can use to manage competing priorities and ensure that investments deliver digital transformation.
Beyond the best network operations!
Current international industry trends predict mid-term reductions of profitability margins for telecom operators, in particularfor mature markets. This is a result of huge investments (GSMA estimates that telecom operators will invest $1.7 trillionon capex during 2014-2020) that are required to build next-generation networks in order to satisfy the data- demandexplosion and revenue reduction caused by mobile price wars and competition from OTT.
Procurement 4.0 in the digital world
The world is changing: decreasing levels of in-house value-add and increasing speed of market and technological changes require procurement to transform into an agile, linked innovation leader and real-time, integrated supply-chain manager.
Outsourcing model redesign
Outsourcing has been widely implemented in all industries. While some of these partnerships have failed miserably, others were perceived as successful. The aspired advantages, such as cost savings, flexibility and access to innovation, have often turned into dependency and inability to get the full value of the relationship. Taking a fresh look can provide the opportunity to transform the operational as well as the contractual set-up and to radically increase the value.
Digital Transformation
Turning digital has become a well-understood imperative. Although digital has commonly found its way into corporate strategies, the path to transforming adequately remains unspecified.
Future of Operations in the digital world
Industry 4.0 and the related new technologies, such as the “Internet of Things”, “cyber-physical systems” and “additive manufacturing”, will drive radical performance improvements in terms of cost and customer excitement. CxOs in all industries are currently defining their ways to explore and exploit the benefits. The bad news is that the variety of technologies and limited number of industrialized examples make it hard to understand the complexity of the topic.
How to start off with "Industry 4.0" now!
"Industry 4.0" is currently on everyone’s lips. Which topics are just hyped? Which technologies have real value for the operations of your company? How, where and when should you implement them to gain profits in the short and long terms? Although the complexity of the questions is high, it is not advisable to wait. Pioneers can gain significant competitive advantage in the short term by following the right approach.
Managing Global Production Networks
Global megatrends create transformation pressure on the manufacturing industry and their global production networks. Our recent study on “Managing global production networks” analyzed how companies are achieving high performing production networks e.g. by managing network goals, network structure and network coordination. It became obvious that today’s global competition requires companies to strengthen network capabilities vs. a site capabilities and are able to constantly evolve the network design to respond to the dynamic market in an agile way.
Anticipating the Operations of the Future
During the last decade business operations have been transformed in a way that has never been seen before. What does the future hold for operations management and how can it react to ever accelerating change? In this brief article the authors take a quick look at some of the likely characteristics of the operations of the future, and how operational leaders can best respond.
Hitting the Bulls-Eye: Value Sourcing
The traditional procurement model does not help organizations achieve additional and sustainable financial targets. The CFO is asked to use the procurement department as an internal value partner to address and discuss new ways of spending the budget; often called value sourcing.
More About Bernd
- Cooperative State University of Baden WuerttembergBusiness Administration