Hi,
For it's day, DWM was a pretty modern company and certainly during the late 30s it was far ahead in many ways. The company was large, to say the least and used a variable workforce. When labour was required in order to fullfill large contracts or during wartime the number of employees could easily double. During the early 1900s they employed some 3,500 people. Many of them women and girls, better suited to perform high-quality large-scale production and a reliable workforce during war years. During 1890 half of the then 3,000 people strong workforce (1,500) were women.
Working time would again be variable, depending on the current state of affairs. Normally a 6-day working week was the norm. This could be changed to 2 or 3 shifts a day depending on the workload.
Companies like DWM, who often depended on wartime production and large foreign contracts, could only function as a company by adding supplemental business or sideline business to their production. Production of metal flasks, ball-bearings, telephone equipment, metal cylinders, pushbuttons, cutlary were all used to survive the quiet years.
This survival-approach was repeated just after the 2nd World War as part of DWM focused on production of railroad equipment (and the infamous 'amphicar', a 1960s boat/car combo). This part survives today as part of Bombardier Transport. The ammunition branch of DWM also took up the production of packaging machinery and is still in business as IWKA.
Below are some pretty rare images showing some of DWM's production facilities during the 1900-1913 period. The first images show the forest of driveshaft belts common during those days. The last image was published in 1939 and shows a part of the automated ammunition quality assurance machinery.
DWM employed a separate R&D department and their own machinist shops. They sold ammunition and arms production material to companies around the world and had interests in Vickers, Pieper, FN, Durener Metallwerken, Waffen- und Maschinenfabrik AG in Budapest, DWF (a French ballbearing production company), Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (today's DaimlerChrysler), Bresciana in Brescia, Hess-Bright manufacturing in Philadelphia.
Most daughter companies and interests in other companies were lost as the result of WW1.
<a href="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/dwm_assembly.jpg" target="_fullview"><img src="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/dwm_assembly.jpg" width="400" alt="Click for fullsize image" /></a>
<a href="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/dwm_barrelmaking.jpg" target="_fullview"><img src="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/dwm_barrelmaking.jpg" width="400" alt="Click for fullsize image" /></a>
<a href="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/dwm_forging_dept.jpg" target="_fullview"><img src="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/dwm_forging_dept.jpg" width="400" alt="Click for fullsize image" /></a>
<a href="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/ammo_1939.jpg" target="_fullview"><img src="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/ammo_1939.jpg" width="400" alt="Click for fullsize image" /></a>