Quality management

High-quality products and services from Zeppelin

Ensuring high-quality services and products, as well as meeting the requirements and needs of customers, is essential for Zeppelin’s success as a foundation-owned company that operates sustainably. Satisfied customers form the basis for long-term cooperation based on partnership and trust. Zeppelin attaches great importance to this as part of its quality policy, which was published as Group Guidelines. Zeppelin lives by its special awareness of quality in all companies and across national borders, which is underlined in the German companies by a uniform management system in accordance with DIN EN ISO 9001:2015 for internal and external purposes.

The Group Management Board actively promotes the continuous improvement of quality by providing the necessary resources, data and information, and appoints a quality management officer for this purpose whose role is to ensure ongoing development of the management system. The effectiveness of the quality management system is reviewed once a year as part of the management review by the Group Management Board.

All Zeppelin employees are appropriately trained and qualified and make a significant contribution to ensuring high quality is achieved. Every manager and every employee is committed to ongoing further training, a willingness to learn and acceptance of quality improvements.

Progress in quality management

The Zeppelin Group encourages its employees to develop their own ideas and contribute them to the company. As part of the Z IDEA ideas management system, employees are given the opportunity to improve processes and develop new ideas. This not only advances the company, but also promotes interdisciplinary team building and dialog. Every idea that is evaluated positively will be rewarded with a bonus. Based on the positively evaluated and award-winning ideas, knowledge and innovativeness are evaluated for continuous improvement. For ideas with a quantifiable benefit, the idea generator will be entitled to an implementation bonus of 10% of the value of the idea’s benefit; implementation bonuses are subject to a country-specific cap. For ideas without a calculable benefit, the idea generator is entitled to a country-specific flat-rate bonus, which is paid out in full before implementation.

In 2023, around 21% of the ideas submitted received an award and a total of EUR 49,425 was paid out to Zeppelin idea generators. A total of 23 IDEA generators with 15 ideas were recognized in the Z IDEA Award in the following four categories: “Best Idea”, “Best Campaign Idea”, “Best Unfeasible Idea” and “Expert of the Year”. Due to the war of aggression against Ukraine, employees of the companies Zeppelin Ukraine, Zeppelin Russia, and Zeppelin Power Systems Russia were not included.

In addition, Zeppelin Ideas Management is linked to the promotion of charities. For each submitted idea that is assessed by an expert within 30 days, 50 will automatically be added to a notional donation account. The beneficiary charities will be announced and the donations presented at the Z IDEA Award event, which this year takes place in July.

The first e-learning course on the Integrated Management System (IMS) was rolled out in 2019 for all employees falling within the scope of application of the IMS. In 2021, a separate e-learning course on “Sustainability at Zeppelin” was established worldwide in order to create a uniform understanding of CSR across national borders and to provide concrete tips on the integration of sustainability into everyday life. The areas on which the e-learning courses focus are updated annually and change depending on the training needs. The target of a participation rate of more than 50% in e-learning is currently only monitored for the mandatory e-learning courses in the area of IMS and has been achieved every year.

There was no new IMS training in the 2023 reporting year. At the end of 2023, a new e-learning course on CSR at Zeppelin was developed and advertised worldwide within the Group. The participation rate for this voluntary e-learning course is 60%, which is above the target. This is testament to employees’ significant interest in sustainability topics.

Measures in 2023

Optimization of process management

In 2022, Zeppelin conducted an analysis of the Internal Control System (ICS) for the relevant Group companies. Potential for improvement in the areas of automation, documentation and process efficiency was identified. Use of the identified potential for improvement began in 2023. This involves integrating key end-to-end processes of each company into the process management program in order to be able to monitor and improve them in the long term. In 2022, the program was introduced in the Group Tax department and in the Operational Excellence department of Zeppelin Rental GmbH. The pilot project and launch took place at Zeppelin Systems GmbH in 2023. The roll-out is currently taking place at Zeppelin CZ s.r.o., as well as the implementation planned by mid-2025 in the ten largest companies selected based on sales volume.

The Plant Engineering SBU and Power Systems SBU have also begun to introduce new management software to supplement the system described above. Using the web-based program, it is possible to view process descriptions, procedural and work instructions as well as further documents via a central information database, to make day-to-day work easier. The system will serve as a comprehensive knowledge management tool for all employees.

Employee training

The e-learning on CSR, newly developed in 2023, contains eight voluntary learning units including an introduction video by the Group Managing Director responsible for the division and highlights several perspectives on the importance of CSR at Zeppelin. The content is available in German with English subtitles.

In addition, a comprehensive training concept for all German companies was created and introduced in 2023. The training program includes standard training with workshops on ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 50001 and internal auditor training.