News about WERMA

04 Jun 2020

Top 100 Innovation Champions – WERMA Signaltechnik once again honoured in the prestigious industry award scheme

For the fifth time WERMA, the signal technology manufacturer, has been awarded a place in the top 100 innovators listing

Top 100 Innovation Champions – WERMA Signaltechnik once again honoured in the prestigious industry award scheme

An innovative SME such as WERMA Signaltechnik based in Rietheim-Weilheim has no fear of moving on from the old and grasping new challenges and in fact sees change as a great opportunity.  In this way the company has been honoured for the 5th time in the 27th listing of top Innovators. The highly sophisticated selection procedure has placed the company in the Category C – companies with more than 200 staff – innovative processes and organisation.

WERMA development system

The five times listed top innovator specialises in the development of optical and audible signal products including associated intelligent software solutions. The innovation process of the southern Germany based company centres on the “WERMA development system” which consists of initial brainstorming followed by project and realisation phases.

The initial phase begins with the basic simple idea which contains the target group or customer and the problem which needs to be solved. In order to motivate the creativity of team members the company uses the innovation technique of “design thinking”. Working in inter-disciplinary groups the objective is to build an initial prototype as quickly as possible. Every year this top innovator develops between 10 and 15 such initial ideas.  The most promising are then selected and moved into a development project.

A further substantial element of the innovation process is the company’s in-house software capability. WERMA uses “scrum” techniques in searching for new solutions being a methodology ideal for agile project management. The results from this process have been excellent so much so that the company now only works on these principals. CEO Matthias Marquardt comments: “it has been very important to us for some time now that we engage with our customers as early as possible and to work together flexibly which is made possible using such agile project management techniques.”

TOP 100 – the award scheme

Since 1993 compamedia has presented Top 100 awards for exceptional innovative forces and above average innovative performance amongst the SME community. Since 2002 under the expert scientific leadership of Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke who is the founder and chairman of the Institute for entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Economics in Vienna. The mentor of the Top 100 is the economics journalist Ranga Yogeshwar. Project partners include the Fraunhofer Institute for the promotion of research within the BVMW. Media partners Manager magazine, Impulses and W & V carry out cross industry company comparisons.  For more information see www.top100.de.

Press contact

Udo Skarke
General Manager • WERMA USA

Tel. +1 (470) 361 / 0600
us-info@werma.com