What is Global Production Academy (GPA) - China Chapter?

The Global Production Academy (GPA) China Chapter initiative by KIT/GAMI and VDMA/GMECS Shanghai. This program brings together top-tier manufacturing leaders to foster innovation, share best practices, and drive excellence in global production.

Why Participate?

• Peer Exchange in Workshops: Engage with industry leaders from non-competing companies.
• Access to Research: Gain insights from the latest state-of-the-art solutions.
• Practical Knowledge: Implement proven practices in your operations.

Structure of the Program

The GPA consists of five one-day meetings held at the sites of participating companies. Each meeting includes presentations, discussions, workshops, and site tours. The topics are chosen based on an initial survey of the participants, ensuring relevance and practical value to everyone.

GPA 2024/2025 Topics Review：

• Cost reduction strategies deployment

Participants structured cost-reduction measures into four streams: Engineering & Design to Cost, Process/System Improvements, Make-or-Buy, and Localization/Supply Chain. An exemplary city-bike functional breakdown helped to reveal where unnecessary features drove costs and guided targeted redesigns with the highest savings potential.

• China going global – The role of the Chinese plant

To bolster HQ competitiveness, the role of the China site was examined amid expanding Chinese rivals. Strengths—speed, cost, adaptability—were converted into actions such as targeted R&D shifts and production for emerging markets. North Star Methods were developed to enhance HQ–China coopetition (collaboration + competition).

• Localization 2.0

Moving toward local autonomy, capability building, and own value creation—framed the session. Core enablers were presented, such as B/C-part localization and German–Chinese leadership. These enablers were placed on a 1.0 to 2.0 continuum and evaluated against three criteria: local know-how, site independence, and use of local technologies/partnerships.

• Digital lean production system deployment

Participants mapped best practices and challenges, classified tools by maturity from analog to autonomous, built an effort–benefit matrix to prioritize quick wins and major bets, and extracted project charters from successful deployments to shape implementation roadmaps for digital lean.

• Data-based decision-making

Decision systems were benchmarked across descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive levels; local and global KPIs were aligned, success drivers distilled, and shared guardrails and templates created to accelerate adoption of data-driven decision-making.

• Choosing the right level of automation

Ideation methods were applied in the workshop session to a real factory case, evaluating options from operator assistance to full automation and using poster sessions to identify plant-specific solutions and draft flexible, scalable implementation steps for individual lines.