The challenges and benefits of working in the Bosch headquarter!

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The challenges and benefits of working in the Bosch headquarter!

Christiane • 31.August, 2009 @ 01:30 • Abgelegt unter: Marketing / Vertrieb

Time to blog. After spending almost a year in different functions of the Bosch Aftermarket Division I moved on to the Bosch headquarter. From here you oversee everything from a bird’s eye view. This position is even underlined by the Bosch headquarter building which is located on a hill in the middle of a forest next to Stuttgart; from here you have even physically an overview on all strategic topics.

A mandatory placement of a sales trainee is the department of Corporate Sales and Marketing. Since my leitmotiv of my program is “automotive sales” I choose to work in the department Corporate Sales and Marketing Automotive (C/MSA). This department is responsible for all sales and marketing activities within the business sector “Automotive” and reports directly to the board of management. From here all corporate standards and process related to sales and marketing are steered. On the one hand C/MSA offers supporting and consulting service to the sales and marketing organisation on the other hand the department has a governance role and regulates process related to sales and marketing. Main objective of the governance role is to ensure the principle “one fact to the customer” throughout all business units of the business sector automotive. This implies to coordinate nine individual acting business units with more than 3.500 sales and marketing employees. The challenge here is to have a continuous contact to the base, indentify their problems and challenges and consequently develop adequate supporting measures and rules without loosing the overall strategic objectives.

What are my tasks here? One major topic of the department is risk management which also implies to govern central directives, which can be described as the “Bosch law”. What ever is stipulated in a central directive is binding for all sales and marketing employees within Bosch. My task is to update the central directive for tooling cost. That means talking with different central department, customer teams and other stakeholder within the organisation in order to find the best and guidelines for the handling of tolling costs with customers. Moreover my daily tasks are filled with developing concepts and strategic approaches for specific sales challenges. These days the topics and challenges are often triggered by the automotive crisis we face.

A task more related to marketing is the development of an internal communication concept. Objective is to design an efficient communication concept for our internal topics and measurement. This is something I never did before. However it is interesting to see how internal information is channelled in order to reach a broad acceptance within in the organisation.

Besides my daily tasks the major benefit of being here is to get the big picture and insights of the business sector Automotive. How the different business divisions interact with each other, where they depend on each other and which are the major challenges they are facing. What I like most is the wide range of information which is allocated here. New concepts, trends and strategies are evaluated here. This makes the task portfolio of this department quite wide and thus very interesting.

However, after nearly four months strategy and bird’s eye view I am looking forward dealing with more operative tasks close to the customer. My next and also last placement will be in the customer team for Volkswagen for Diesel Products. That means for me new customer and new products. In my next blog I let you write more about my experiences as interface to the customer.

Christiane