Prof. Dr. Christoph Roser is an expert for lean production and a professor for production management at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe, Germany. He studied automation engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Ulm, Germany and did his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts, researching flexible design methodologies. Afterwards he worked for five years at the Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories in Nagoya, Japan, studying the Toyota Production System and developing bottleneck detection and buffer allocation methods. Following Toyota he joined McKinsey & Company in Munich, Germany, specializing in lean manufacturing and driving numerous projects in all segments of industry. Before becoming a professor he worked for the Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany, first as a lean expert for research and training, then using his expertise as a production logistics manager in the Bosch Thermotechnik Division. In 2013, he was appointed professor for production management at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe to continue his research and teaching on lean manufacturing.
Throughout his career Dr. Roser worked on lean projects in almost two hundred different plants, including automotive, machine construction, solar cells, chip manufacturing, gas turbine industry, paper making, logistics, power tools, heating, packaging, food processing, white goods, security technology, finance, and many more. He is an award-winning author of over fifty academic publications. Besides research, teaching, and consulting on lean manufacturing he is very interested into different approaches to manufacturing organization, both historical and current. He blogs about his experiences and research on AllAboutLean.com and just published his first book “Faster, Better, Cheaper” on the history of manufacturing.
