Research and development

Strategic focus of research and development

The focus of research and development (R&D) is determined by the Strategy 2020. The KION Group pursues the primary objective of increasing the customer benefits in all price segments and sales regions and, by adhering to modular and platform strategies, offering high quality as well as high-performance products at competitive prices. This involves structuring R&D cost-effectively, reducing the complexity and diversity of products and shortening development times for new products. R&D essentially works on a cross-brand and cross-region basis, which ensures that research findings and technological know-how are shared across the Group. In addition, specialist product development teams working for the individual brand companies and regions develop customer-specific solutions.

In the Industrial Trucks & Services segment, the focus for premium products remains on total cost of ownership for customers. The objective is to minimise these costs, which include the purchase price, maintenance and repair costs and energy use, while complying with environmental targets and regulatory requirements in order to create highly efficient and competitive products for customers. In the volume and economy segments, the KION Group is establishing shared, cross-brand and cost-efficient platforms that enable low-cost production yet allow a strong degree of regional differentiation in the industrial trucks. The development centre in the southern Chinese city of Xiamen plays a particularly crucial role here.

The Supply Chain Solutions segment focuses, on the one hand, on refining its central software solution, Dematic iQ. This includes optimising the standard package and making customer-specific and region-specific modifications. On the other hand, the manual and automated supply chain solutions, including their components, are being constantly enhanced in order to achieve even faster processes, seamless integration of all production and logistics steps and even greater productivity while using the same amount of space.

Across the segments, brand companies, and regions, the KION Group has brought together the technical functions – research and development, procurement, quality and production processes – in the new CTO organisation in order to make its operating units more competitive. Uniform standards and global coordination of technical activities should enable the KION Group to offer more product variants with less effort and shorter development processes in future.

Key R&D figures

Focus of R&D in 2016