IHK Rheinhessen honors student Maria Kunkel for top bachelors thesis

Weinheim. Maria Kunkel remembers the exact moment. “As I sat in a lecture, a surprise call came in. My bachelor thesis had won first prize,” she recalls. “I did not expect that. I was overwhelmed and delighted.” The 26-year-old, who is studying international management at the University of Applied Sciences Worms, wrote her thesis while she was at Freudenberg Sealing Technologies in Weinheim. She first completed her internship and then, over a three-month period, composed the thesis that IHK Rheinhessen honored: “Basic Research and Model Development to Link Freudenberg Sealing Technologies Investment Planning with Risk/Reward Analyses for Individual Lead Centers.” At the company, Hans Kloos and Volker Schroiff, both from Technology Management at Freudenberg Sealing Technologies, supported Kunkel’s work, which earned an evaluation of 1.0. “The cooperation was great,” Kunkel said. “The company has a culture that is open to error, and there is a great deal of discussion. Together we considered how best to achieve the objective. That is great motivation.”

What exactly did Kunkel develop? Markets are becoming more volatile and dynamic. So it is becoming more difficult for companies to make predictions and plan their budgets. Freudenberg Sealing Technologies thus set the goal of developing an optimized, transparent model for investment budget distribution among the divisions and Lead Centers. Kunkel tied risk and opportunities analysis to investment planning and developed five models. In the end, she developed a special Excel tool that distributed the budget among the individual Lead Centers automatically, based on the type of operational investment. The jury saw her model as a very helpful approach to operational decision-making.

Kunkel has meanwhile begun her masters studies at the university in Worms, with finance and controlling as her specialty. Her goal is to work in strategic controlling.