Strategy development at ERNST Umformtechnik

Staufen consultants support strategy 2026 

“To remain profitable in the long term, we have in the past regularly drawn up a corporate strategy with a five-year horizon,” says Matthias Ernst, the son of the company’s founder. Due to the Corona pandemic, the current strategy process initially had to be pushed back by one year and finally started in 2021: “The new alignment is of course strongly influenced by the market-driven transformation away from vehicles with combustion technology. Our company must successfully master challenges relating to electromobility, digitization, sustainability, and securing our location.” Developing a new strategy costs management above all time. This is a scarce resource, as the two managing directors are heavily involved in day-to-day business. Herbert Gieringer: “A corporation has the human resources to work out its strategy completely on its own, but a medium-sized company cannot.” The management therefore relied on outside help and brought consultants from Staufen AG on board. 

“Without external consultants, we might have focused too much on our core business and designed a strategy for the present instead of the future,” Matthias Ernst adds as another reason. And Herbert Gieringer explains: “In the sheet metal forming market, there are other industries besides the automotive sector that are of interest. Here, we needed the perspective and expertise of the Staufen experts in order to work out the 2026 strategy together – starting with the development of a vision for ERNST Umformtechnik.” 

Focus on the essentials instead of learning by doing 

At the beginning of the new strategy cycle, there was an honest assessment of what was not ideally working according to previous processes. “We know the market, we know what measures need to be taken,” explains Managing Director Gieringer. “In the past, however, we did not achieve some goals because we did not consistently implement everything we had strategically defined.” The role of the Staufen consultants was therefore not only to drive the strategy process in a focused manner, but also to ensure its consistent implementation. Gieringer therefore found sparring with the consultants in particular to be extremely positive: “The consultants look at our business in a completely different way. They scrutinize us closely and often take a different perspective, which is important and necessary. The methodological strength and experience of Staufen allowed us to move forward with the strategy process in a much more focused way, instead of progressing slowly through learning by doing.”