Niklas Brundin
Niklas’ exceptional breadth and depth of consulting experience enables him to deliver results of the highest quality for his clients.
Education
The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH (Sweden)
Master of Industrial Engineering and Management
Niklas is a Partner in the Stockholm office and leads the local Automotive & Manufacturing practice. He primarily advises companies in the sectors of Automotive, Manufacturing, and Private equity.
With almost 20 years in international strategy consulting with Arthur D. Little, creating value for clients primarily in the Manufacturing and Automotive industries and addressing a wide range of functional topics, Niklas has accumulated a solid base of experience with the key challenges faced by top management. Niklas believes in the need for companies to be highly innovative and agile in meeting the challenges of a hypercompetitive world. Niklas is analytical, creative, solutions-focused, and experienced in designing and managing change programs to a successful result.
Niklas holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from KTH, Sweden. He had a Major in Manufacturing management with, e.g., a master’s thesis on Lean Manufacturing.
Niklas is married, has two beautiful daughters, and lives just outside Stockholm. He is active in his spare time and enjoys sports, family & friends, and being on the sea.
Time for a strategic manufacturing footprint reassessment
Global supply chains are under scrutiny due to material shortages, rising costs, and ethical demands. Adapting to a changing world is crucial for maintaining robust and responsive supply chains. This Viewpoint highlights the urgency for manufacturing firms to reassess their locations, prioritizing not just cost efficiency but also resilience, adaptability, and responsibility.
Boosting innovation in industrial companies with corporate venturing
Innovation is at the core of the most successful companies, but as budgets are squeezed by short-term priorities, competition from nontraditional players, and market challenges, corporations must be judicious with their funds. While corporate venturing has historically been a less well-defined path to strategic value creation, its investment structure, nimble nature, and financial profile make it an attractive option if structured properly.
Hydrogen: Trucking’s alternative fuel of the future
Hydrogen-powered trucks offer the promise of an attractive alternative to battery electric (BEV) trucks for tackling the challenge of decarbonizing heavy-duty and long-haul trucking. As the production cost of hydrogen decreases and the investment in relevant infrastructure grows, hydrogen fuel cells will emerge as a commercially viable green alternative that will outcompete fossil fuels. In this Viewpoint, we explore the future of hydrogen trucking.
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.
Turning customers into subscribers – How to successfully make the shift
What customers expect from manufacturing businesses is changing, moving away from outright purchase- to subscription-based models. This offers opportunities and risks for traditional players, providing them with access to greater customer insight, but also lowering barriers for competitors. Based on case examples, this article looks at how manufacturers can make the shift to subscriptionbased businesses.
E-Learning – A tool for successful change
Today’s global trends, such as high speed of innovation and technological change, require manufacturing companies to be agile and quickly implement sustainable changes to survive.
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.
Agility for Successful Supply Chains
Most manufacturing companies are facing volatile and unpredictable demand due to trends such as increased global competition, shorter business cycles and broader product ranges. To survive in this competitive and fast-changing environment, it is necessary to improve flexibility and become truly agile. The required flexibility levels have to consider volume fluctuations, product mix fluctuations and customer lead time requirements. Tools and strategies that enable the supply chain to meet these requirements, without compromising on the unit cost, must be implemented.
The Future of Active Safety
Active safety and driver assistance systems are taking big steps towards greater autonomy, as systems are becoming increasingly “connected” and algorithms to process the data are becoming more and more advanced. Nissan has announced plans to develop a fully autonomous car by 2020, Volvo aspires to have autonomous cars on roads by 2017, Mercedes demonstrated its self-driving S-class in 2013, and Google has been testing its self-driving car on Californian roads since 2012 for a planned product launch by 2018.
The Struggle for Survival
The last years the European automotive industry has faced an unprecedented downturn dramatically impacting sales volumes and profit margins both at OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and automotive retailers' level.
At the Other End of Innovation
The focus on innovation, and the ever-faster introduction of products, is building larger and more complex product port-folios. At the “Other end of innovation” we find that many companies are not managing to phase-out old, low volume or low margin products at the same pace that new products are added.
Inbound supply chain development
As manufacturing companies shift towards buying on a system level rather than component level, driven by outsourcing and low cost sourcing strategy, the inbound supply chain becomes somewhat of a “black box” with little transparency beyond the first tier supplier interface.
Niklas is a Partner in the Stockholm office and leads the local Automotive & Manufacturing practice. He primarily advises companies in the sectors of Automotive, Manufacturing, and Private equity.
With almost 20 years in international strategy consulting with Arthur D. Little, creating value for clients primarily in the Manufacturing and Automotive industries and addressing a wide range of functional topics, Niklas has accumulated a solid base of experience with the key challenges faced by top management. Niklas believes in the need for companies to be highly innovative and agile in meeting the challenges of a hypercompetitive world. Niklas is analytical, creative, solutions-focused, and experienced in designing and managing change programs to a successful result.
Niklas holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from KTH, Sweden. He had a Major in Manufacturing management with, e.g., a master’s thesis on Lean Manufacturing.
Niklas is married, has two beautiful daughters, and lives just outside Stockholm. He is active in his spare time and enjoys sports, family & friends, and being on the sea.
Time for a strategic manufacturing footprint reassessment
Global supply chains are under scrutiny due to material shortages, rising costs, and ethical demands. Adapting to a changing world is crucial for maintaining robust and responsive supply chains. This Viewpoint highlights the urgency for manufacturing firms to reassess their locations, prioritizing not just cost efficiency but also resilience, adaptability, and responsibility.
Boosting innovation in industrial companies with corporate venturing
Innovation is at the core of the most successful companies, but as budgets are squeezed by short-term priorities, competition from nontraditional players, and market challenges, corporations must be judicious with their funds. While corporate venturing has historically been a less well-defined path to strategic value creation, its investment structure, nimble nature, and financial profile make it an attractive option if structured properly.
Hydrogen: Trucking’s alternative fuel of the future
Hydrogen-powered trucks offer the promise of an attractive alternative to battery electric (BEV) trucks for tackling the challenge of decarbonizing heavy-duty and long-haul trucking. As the production cost of hydrogen decreases and the investment in relevant infrastructure grows, hydrogen fuel cells will emerge as a commercially viable green alternative that will outcompete fossil fuels. In this Viewpoint, we explore the future of hydrogen trucking.
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.
Turning customers into subscribers – How to successfully make the shift
What customers expect from manufacturing businesses is changing, moving away from outright purchase- to subscription-based models. This offers opportunities and risks for traditional players, providing them with access to greater customer insight, but also lowering barriers for competitors. Based on case examples, this article looks at how manufacturers can make the shift to subscriptionbased businesses.
E-Learning – A tool for successful change
Today’s global trends, such as high speed of innovation and technological change, require manufacturing companies to be agile and quickly implement sustainable changes to survive.
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.
Agility for Successful Supply Chains
Most manufacturing companies are facing volatile and unpredictable demand due to trends such as increased global competition, shorter business cycles and broader product ranges. To survive in this competitive and fast-changing environment, it is necessary to improve flexibility and become truly agile. The required flexibility levels have to consider volume fluctuations, product mix fluctuations and customer lead time requirements. Tools and strategies that enable the supply chain to meet these requirements, without compromising on the unit cost, must be implemented.
The Future of Active Safety
Active safety and driver assistance systems are taking big steps towards greater autonomy, as systems are becoming increasingly “connected” and algorithms to process the data are becoming more and more advanced. Nissan has announced plans to develop a fully autonomous car by 2020, Volvo aspires to have autonomous cars on roads by 2017, Mercedes demonstrated its self-driving S-class in 2013, and Google has been testing its self-driving car on Californian roads since 2012 for a planned product launch by 2018.
The Struggle for Survival
The last years the European automotive industry has faced an unprecedented downturn dramatically impacting sales volumes and profit margins both at OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and automotive retailers' level.
At the Other End of Innovation
The focus on innovation, and the ever-faster introduction of products, is building larger and more complex product port-folios. At the “Other end of innovation” we find that many companies are not managing to phase-out old, low volume or low margin products at the same pace that new products are added.
Inbound supply chain development
As manufacturing companies shift towards buying on a system level rather than component level, driven by outsourcing and low cost sourcing strategy, the inbound supply chain becomes somewhat of a “black box” with little transparency beyond the first tier supplier interface.
More About Niklas
- The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH (Sweden)Master of Industrial Engineering and Management