Porsche to Hit High Targets

Increasing sales in emerging worldwide markets and enthusiastic targets for 2018 have forced Porsche to adopt enterprising and unusual strategies to meet the demand for their new 911 Sports Coupe, Matthias Mueller, CEO of Porsche has revealed.

"Our biggest challenge is to manage our growth in a controlled way. We need to hire new staff, expand production capacity, the suppliers need to adjust to our requirements, there's a whole bunch of measures that need to be synchronized with each other," Matthias Mueller told media at the Detroit Auto Show in January.

Porsche are aiming to ship 200,000 vehicles a year by 2018, after sales rose to 119,000 in 2011. A large quantity of these sales are hoped to be generated by the Cajun SUV which will hit the showrooms in early 2014.

Output is usually enhanced by improvements to the functional design of the assembly lines where a manufacturer cannot increase its premises size. Porsche’s Stuttgart plant in Germany is in the middle of an urban area, which prevents the options to expand. With a pressing need for extra space Porsche managed to talk local supplier Duerr into selling some real estate next to their plant and have now built a new paint shop that adheres to strict urban zoning legislation.

Mueller continued: "From a topography point of view, the plant isn't ideal. We could, for example, free up more space by moving the customer service repair shop that is in the middle of the plant somewhere else."

Mueller also revealed that better training of the plant’s employees could help the assembly lines run faster and prevent quality control problems from arising.

Porsche are very conscious of preserving the 911’s brand purity so have ruled out the obvious solution of moving production to its Leipzig plant where there are no constraints on space at all.

"It's a dogma, the 911 is built in Zuffenhausen," he said, in reference to the district in Stuttgart where Porsche’s operations are based.

Mueller has an agreement with Volkswagen, that should bottlenecks in the production of other models develop that Porsche could use VW manufacturing plants on a temporary basis.

"Porsches should be built at Porsche factories whenever possible," he explained.

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