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Siemens Case Analysis Introduction: Siemens Company is a well-known firm that operates in more than 160 countries in the world. Headquarters are located in Munich and branches called Research & Development Center (RDC) are strategically located world wide. The company specializes in many domains such as telecommunications, space probe technologies, data systems, heavy electrical equipments, nuclear plants, medical technologies and railroad equipment.There is presently a strong competition in these fields with players like Alcatel, Lucent and Ericsson.
On more precise market like cell phones, Siemens also has big competitors such as Nokia. Over the decades, the company has been recognized for its business philosophy: "Second is best". They therefore have a tendency to take someone else's idea and try to improve it the best they can. Siemens is also conservative on many points like its credit rating. In 2000, Siemens was supporting 120,000 patents, employing 53,000 persons and investing 10 billions $ in research and development.Siemens was also known to be quite conservative.
Either for their business strategy or their economical status, they always tried to be really safe. On another side, the company had developed a legendary ability to manage large, complex projects and prided itself on quality and durability. Siemens was using since its beginning a traditional German consensus-building style management but slowly change it to a more US-Style management mainly based on General Electric model.Following this change, Siemens introduce a ten-point plan that includes many elements like divesting poor-performing units in favour of strengthening remaining businesses with the potential to become world's leader in their field, setter tougher profit targets for managers, trying as much as 60% of managers' pay to performance, trimming the high-cost German workforce and management by as much as a third, reducing overtime pay, adopting US accounting principles and more aggressively incorporating marketing into its product development processes.
A de facto partition thus emerged with Munich taking leadership for creating and maintaining new releases of the platform product (baseline projects) and some major RDCs focusing on customization projects and field service (customer projects). Baseline projects were partitioned into subprojects and then placed with regional centers under the project leadership in Munich. Over the years, however, Siemens had followed a strategy of shifting more autonomy to its regional centers to strengthen its global presence.Munich coordinated project work through a matrix structure. Munich headquarters typically coordinated cooperation between its research development centers (RDC) through formal channels, including annual technical conferences at Munich involving representatives from different RDC members, as well as through facilitating informal, often serendipitous encounters between different RDC members at Munich.
This case is relates certain events that happen during the last years implying mainly employees from Munich and from its Indian branch in Bangalore.It talks about the various cultural differences that Siemens had to overcome to realise big projects. In general, German and Indian employees were getting along well. Indians were impressed by the German's meticulousness and the German were impressed by the enthusiasm and diligence of Indian employees. On the other side, Indians were sometimes considers as self workers and German, disloyal on some of their attitudes.
There was also some communication problem between Munich and Bangalore, in example, an Indian worker that says
