WS 2002 - 2003: Hannover Messe

In September 19 of 2002, i was among the group of engineering students and researchers of the department of Business Logistics and Management , who received an extende invitation from the Thyssenkrupp to visit the Industrial Exhibition in Hannover (250 kms in the south)

The groupf of Prof.Dr.Kersten (the oldest guy in the Photo) was in that moment very focused to the Organization of Production Processes, and for us, this invitation was specially attractive due the "59. IAA - Nutzfährtzeuge", that means, the industrial trucks exhibition.

The most of students were also from the IPM program, who studied previously the complexity management for product platforms in engineering products and modularization, e.g., in the automotive industry. Both photos with special-purpose trucks corresponds to the stand of Mercedes Benz.



This kind of industrial exhibition serves, beside the presentation in product innovation, for the recruitment of new generation of mechanicals engineers from the network of technical universities and Fachhochschules (technical institutes) in Germany.

For fanatics of heavy-duty machinery of any branch of the industry, like me, the "Messe" is something like the Magic Kingdom, demanding to the child in us, to ask all about equipment and devices, and minutes later, to return to every "interesting" stand, over and over again, to ask something more...

Probably for competitors, the exhibition is a hard test in the customer's eyes, due nobody likes to spend money to buy products in "boring" firms or bad-image companies. Is frequent to find companies with no attractivity in products, services and customer orientation, that means, that the marketing in exhibition is poorly designed: this is the case of companies from India, China and south-east Europe. Normally there are no companies from South America (!).

Hugo