blog_fresenius_header

Fresenius Design Center Shanghai

In October 2015 Fresenius Medical Care opened a Research and Development Center in Shanghai. With the new China Design Center (CDC) the company expanded their R&D activities outside Europe and the United States in order to make its world-leading dialysis treatments and technologies more widely available to patients in China and other emerging markets. In addition to developing a deeper insight into the needs of these markets, the CDC can provide even more innovative and cost-effective solutions for treating kidney disease.+

“The mutual creation of a local company culture was really crucial for us”

… says Thorsten Timm, Vice President of the CDC area of PEC.MID, which is the FMC R&D for dialysis machines. He talked with us about the cultural journey over the last three years, with the aim of establishing a strong local culture based on the global values of FMC.

He knows exactly about the advantages for a company to be located in Shanghai and which crucial points the achievement of the goals will depend on:

  • Bring global R&D closer to the Chinese market
  • Provide access to highly qualified engineers & scientists
  • Hire the best local talents in our field
  • Understand the specific requirements of emerging markets
  • Come up with new ideas for products and services
Discussion with Thorsten and David in the FMC-Kitchen

 

Within the CDC-Cultural Journey Thorsten and his team together with Stefan Fries (Managing Partner of the change factory) have substantiated the eight core values over the last three years and thereby created the local culture.

“To work together in workshops was non-typical for the local culture“ says Stella of the HR department and David from System Engineering adds that it was not so easy to concretize the values and make them tangible. Thorsten adds: “We have thought about some simple and effective instruments and incentives and work for example with scorecards, in order to show how the particular values can be brought to life. In our annual kick-off meeting there are awards for the best implementation. That is how we try to create a good combination of global standard and locally suitable implementation as our culture”.

Thank you very much for the afternoon and the insights!

Would you like to know more?