Hamburg has a long and noble tradition as a port and a centre of trade, and in our day is a hive of vibrant industrial activity. It hosts leading players in the maritime business, aviation, automotive supply, and general mechanical engineering. There is a long-standing, strong track record of close cooperation between many of these businesses and HAW Hamburg’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Production Management, the modern-day successor institution of the Staatliches Technikum originally established in 1905.

You will study in small and international groups, working closely with your professors and partly in English. Most students complete their Master’s thesis in collaboration with an industrial business, which has the dual advantage of promoting research and technological transfer and ensuring a real-world emphasis to the course.

The modules around which the degree course is based are independent units, which run either in the summer or the winter semester. We can therefore offer two starting dates per year to our new students.

This three-semester Master’s degree course in Production Technology and Management is designed to consecutively follow and build on a previous degree course in production technology/production engineering, mechanical engineering or a related discipline. It provides students with the opportunity to graduate with an internationally recognised engineering qualification, the German Ingenieur/in, and enhanced career prospects due to the specific expertise acquired.

Production engineers typically work in industrial settings. Opportunities for them in management are increasingly being joined by roles in sales, product management, technical purchasing, and as internal entrepreneurs with overall or global responsibility for components or logistics networks, supporting and handling the start-to-finish industrial process including client care and leadership.

The particular feature of this degree course is the way it brings together engineering competencies with management skills, developing them via real-life industrial case studies in direct cooperation with businesses from a range of sectors. Focal engineering modules relate to continuously advancing technologies such as precision machining processes, measurement technology in production, gear drive production processes and facilities, plastics processing and metal-forming manufacturing processes. Alongside these, required elective modules explore management concepts.

The professors who deliver teaching on the management side of the course can look back on a wealth of experience in management, putting them in an optimum position to explore with students the holistic view of production processes which globalisation has made a must. Modules in business management, project management and communication, innovation management, operations management, customer-specific processes and international supply chain management form the building blocks for the management component of a Master’s degree course centred on research and technology transfer between institution and industry.

Alongside these opportunities for students to specialise, the course works with the others offered by the Faculty to provide a solid grounding, via required elective subjects, in general topics, such as quality and reliability, systems engineering, business and technology management, technology of materials, and system dynamics and simulation, as well as methodological skills. This means our students leave us with a markedly broad-based perspective on systemic, dynamic concepts in production management and innovative materials. We also offer students the chance to take modules from other Master’s degree courses in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science and from related and relevant degree courses institution-wide.

In this way, you can spend a year in intense engagement with all the knowledge you need, testing and extending it via a Master’s project and in research labs, to then conclude your studies in the third semester with the challenge of your Master thesis. We have great student/staff ratios and will be with you every step of the way.