Excursions

Tuesday morning, 5:45 a.m.: A small group of students from the Faculty of Business Studies stands on the parking lot of FH Aachen, packed with suitcases and bags. Sleepy, but still with great anticipation, they are waiting for the coach that will take them towards Stuttgart.

This semester, the participants in the "Logistics Consulting" specialisation will once again have the opportunity to experience at first hand how lean production is implemented today. The destination of the three-day study trip is Stuttgart, with four companies from different sectors on the agenda. Despite the five-hour bus ride, the students' anticipation was enormous. The companies selected by Jörn Steinbeck, Lecturer at the Faculty of Business Studies, meet the students' taste: "After all, when does a student ever have the opportunity to experience the production of a Porsche or a Mercedes AMG up close and personal on site?" says Oliver Stoll, student in the Master's degree programme Industrial Engineering.The benchmark trip is part of the course "Logistics Consulting", in which the students deepen their knowledge in the field of procurement, production and logistics management and get to know the theories of lean management as well as the methods of process consulting. Through the trip, students learn how these theories and methods are implemented and applied in practice. In each company, a factory tour with subsequent expert lectures is on the programme. In this way, the students can get to know the companies and their products better and also gain exclusive insights into the production processes. They are shown ways to design processes as efficiently and flexibly as possible and to avoid waste as far as possible. One exception was the company Porsche Consulting GmbH: as a management consultancy, there was no factory tour there, but instead exciting insights into the everyday life of a consultant and interesting projects on the topic of lean production.

With many new experiences and some highlights, such as the visit to the "Performance Studio" of Mercedes AMG GmbH, where individual customer wishes come true, the students made their way back home to Aachen after the visit to Pilz GmbH, a company in the field of automation technology.

"I learned a lot on the benchmark trip and am going back to Aachen with a thousand new impressions. I think it's great that FH Aachen makes study trips like this possible," says Daniela Lovric, a student on the Bachelor's degree programme in Business Studies.

Oliver Stoll and Daniela Lovric

Around 30 students from the Faculty of Business Studies took part in an excursion to Cologne to experience practice at first hand. Led by Prof. Dr. Meike Utzerath and Prof. Dr. Mark Knüppel, the excursion first took them to the Cologne Fiscal Court and then to Ernst & Young, one of the "Big Four" auditing and tax consulting firms.

At the Finance Court, the students took part in three hearings of the XI Senate as audience members. For the majority, this was their first contact with a court. They were able to experience the pitfalls that arise in the work of a tax advisor. First, Norbert Eppers, press spokesman of the Cologne Fiscal Court, provided valuable insights about fiscal jurisdiction in general and then about the Cologne Fiscal Court in particular. During the following negotiations, it became clear which often different opinions can exist about a norm. For example, different perspectives on the topics of wage tax, procedural law and turnover tax became apparent. Although the norms were new to many of the students and had not yet been dealt with in the lectures, the presiding judge managed, through his factual, clear and objective manner, to work through the problems in an understandable way and thus make them comprehensible. However, the fundamental insight from the visit to the Fiscal Court was that an oral hearing is the very last stage of a multitude of negotiations in which the argument and not the confrontation is in the foreground.

After refreshments in the casino of the Fiscal Court, with a beautiful view of Cologne Cathedral, the students went to the Ernst & Young office. After a warm welcome, the students were shown by Mr. Christoph Nonn some measures from his practice as a tax consultant in order to advise his clients optimally and to recognise tax dangers in the advice. Afterwards, there was a question and answer session with some of the Ernst & Young staff, where interested students could ask questions on the topics of tax consultancy and the path to becoming a tax consultant.

At the end of the day, the students were left with interesting insights into the world of tax consultancy, the range in which tax norms can be interpreted, but also where this range ends.