How BMW is defusing the demographic time bomb

In June 2007, Nikolaus Bauer, the head of BMW’s 2,500-employee power train plant in Dingolfing, Lower Bavaria, was worrying about what looked like an inevitable decline in the productivity of an aging workforce in the years ahead. With two of his production managers, Peter Jürschick and Helmut Mauermann (a coauthor, with Bauer), he developed an innovative, bottom-up approach for improving productivity that the company is now testing and refining in plants in the United States, Germany, and Austria. The goal is to incorporate it across BMW’s global manufacturing organization.

BMW’s problem was that the average age of the plant’s workers was expected to rise from 39 to 47 by 2017. Because older workers tend to call in sick for longer periods and in general must work harder to maintain their output, bearing the full brunt of the demographic shift would threaten the plant’s ability to execute BMW’s strategy of enhancing competitiveness through technological leadership and productivity improvements.

by Christoph H. Loch, Fabian J. Sting, Nikolaus Bauer, and Helmut Mauermann

Full Story: http://hbr.org/2010/03/the-globe-how-bmw-is-defusing-the-demographic-time-bomb/ar/1