The Globe: 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.