Elmar Kades has 16 years of international experience in purchasing, restructuring and performance improvement covering industries such as automotive, assembly, heavy equipment, consumer goods and chemical industry.

Most recently, Elmar worked 4 years as CPO for the truck group at Knorr-Bremse. He lead a team of approx. 140 buyers and supplier quality developers. His purchasing volume was 1,2 bn EUR direct and 0,3 bn EUR indirect material (KB wide). Key commodities direct material were castings, electronics (ECUs), stampings, plastic and rubber parts and standard parts.

After that he was COO of Knorr-Bremse Asia Pacific Holding’s truck division in Hong Kong being responsible for Japan, Korea, China, India, South East Asia and Australia with a business volume of 110 m EUR.

Prior to that, he was a Partner with McKinsey & Company, Inc., member of the Automotive & Assembly industry sector and Co-Leader of the European Purchase Practice.

A selection of Elmar’s client projects are:

• Interim-CPO for Borg Warners Turbo charger business of 1 bn EUR in Germany
• Led a major procurement transformation program at Lanxess with a purchasing volume of 5 bn EUR
• Supporting the restructuring project of GM
• Supporting and developing Schmitz Cargobull to the world market leader in the trailer business (several years of project work in strategy, development, purchasing, manufacturing)
• Development of a world-class purchasing organization for the Daimler truck division
• Developing and implementing a strategic sourcing strategy for EADS
• Benchmarking leading purchasing organizations for BSH (Bosch and Siemens Home Appliance)
• Purchasing projects with Siemens

Elmar is a member of the Performance Improvement group of AlixPartners and is strongly affiliated to the Automotive Assembly and Industrial Group as well as the Procurement Excellence Group. He studied chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Wuerzburg and holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Zurich.