Fokker Technologies

2015 – Fokker Technologies designs, manufactures and maintains subsystems of airplanes, business aircrafts, helicopters and yachts for major international aerospace companies. Fokker has 4,950 employees worldwide. Of these, 4,000 are employed in the Netherlands, in Papendrecht, Woensdrecht, Helmond, Hoogenveen and Marknesse. Fokker Technologies has been part of GKN Aeorspace since October 2015.

The company participates in the Dutch Smart Industries Program and was one of nine cases in the TNO study: ‘Smart Skills for Smart Industry’. In the following, we summarize this case study on the issues related to workplace innovation. 

Workplace innovation
To be flexible and agile, work at Fokker is done in multidisciplinary and autonomous teams and there is a “democratic leadership". In the past, management at the factory was very direct and hierarchical, almost military. But if the emphasis is on responsible teams, leadership must also change and become more democratic.

Automation and digitization eliminates a lot of manual work. The requirements for employee qualifications become often higher and new qualifications are required, such as ICT skills, self-reliance at all levels, quality and safety management, discipline and good communication skills (also in English)
Employee rating and reward does not (for the time being) change at Fokker Technologies. 

Drivers
The reason for changing the organisation of work and the management is the multidisciplinary character of the work and the production flows themselves (ICT is integrated into everything and with ICT every step in the chain is connected). The speed of the technological changes coupled with other qualification requirements is a second reason and the development of demand on the market a third. Regarding the latter, the series sizes and production volumes have been growing dramatically in the past years  and will grow further in the coming years. This ‘scale jump’ is huge for Fokker: a factor of five to ten compared with the current situation. This means that teams must be flexible and viable and ready to meet all technical requirements. 

Results

There are no results reported in this case study. 

Reference

Govert Gijsbers, Tijs van den Broek, Jop Esmeijer en Jos Sanders. ‘Smart Skills voor smart Industry. Hoe werk verandert in de fabriek van de toekomst’. TNO-rapport TNO 2017 R10618.

This Dutch report can be found on de Dutch version of this knowledge bank, via the link:

https://www.kennisbanksocialeinnovatie.nl/nl/kennis/kennisbank/smart-skills-voor-smart-industry–hoe-werk-verandert-in-de-fabriek-van-de-toekomst/1408