From a bird's eye view

The propellers of the drone begin to turn, faster and faster. The matt gray futuristic insect takes off, spirals vertically upwards, meter by meter, and becomes smaller in the pearly white late summer sky until it is only a pinhead. What the drone now records with its camera is the view that skylarks and wild geese usually have. From up there, the view of the world is different: the disorder of streets, fields, borders, trees and meadows disappears. From above, everything looks strangely ordered. The confused fragmentation dissolves and the large structure becomes visible. Ronny Müller loves this effect, which his drone captures floating above everything. Farsightedness, overview, seeing the big picture: that's what the drone pilot likes. Professionally, he feels the same way, because at GEALAN he is responsible for a very specific part of IT – for demand management, IT from a bird's eye view, so to speak. 

 

"Demand management has to be thought of as gatekeeping," says Ronny Müller, who heads this part of GEALAN-IT. Whenever a GEALAN department needs a new IT solution, the first thing they want is: Does a department need new software? Is there a problem in the company that can be solved elegantly with better IT? "These can be office applications and platforms, but also logistical systems or manufacturing platforms, all the way to IoT systems (Internet of Things) or AI-based applications." Whatever the issue, demand management is taking off. It searches, finds and enables IT solutions – whereby "solutions" is to be understood literally, because good IT solves problems. "The ideal case is that we are on board early, right at the beginning of the idea. Colleagues tell us what goal they want to achieve, and demand management begins to research how we can achieve this goal with the help of IT." Ronny Müller speaks in the "we" form, but he could say "I". Demand Management at GEALAN has been around since 2019, it was created with him and is in his hands alone. 

 

First, Ronny Müller investigates whether there are already suitable solutions in the company or at the parent company VEKA. If not, market research begins: What software could you buy? How well would she fulfill the wishes of her colleagues? Does it correspond to the corporate strategy? Does it fit as it is, or does it need to be adjusted? And above all: How does it fit as seamlessly as possible into the existing world of GEALAN-IT? You have to know this world very well, have a big overview of everything that happens at GEALAN in terms of information technology – the necessary decisions can only be made from this bird's eye view. 

 

Ronny Müller's drone descends and dives between the treetops. It follows the course of an old railway line, flies close above the tracks. Demand management dives into a topic in a similar way when it has recognized a demand. Demand management is deep into it, for example, when the GEALAN ACADEMY, the company's training centre, needs a new IT solution. The management of the ACADEMY seminars, the booking of events, the attendance check for participants, the follow-up of trainings, the certificates for the participants, a reminder function: All this should happen without Excel, without Word and without much e-mail effort and should be taken care of by software. Ronny Müller delves into the working methods of his ACADEMY colleagues. What are their processes? What do they really need? He researches how user guidance, interfaces and interfaces work in various IT solutions, and what their "look and feel" is. During the detailed search, he comes across Courseticket – an Austrian provider of learning platforms and apps. Many providers focus on video conferencing. However, GEALAN does not want to have another new system. Courseticket takes a different approach – it can work with any video conferencing system and focuses on presenting online and face-to-face training in a professional manner – "a really smart solution that takes our ACADEMY presence to a new level and visually melts into our GEALAN look. It covers all the functions that the colleagues wanted. You could even add a points system for seminar participants, a bit of gamification. The GEALAN ACADEMY is very happy with the system." Old German IT, says Ronny Müller, was function, function, function. "It took a lot of training, but often without a user-oriented frontend, without a good look. Modern platforms, on the other hand, are often reduced to a minimum of function, but still functional – and chic; the eye clicks along." He is hopeful that start-ups are often represented with very good new solutions, especially in the German-speaking market. 

 

"For me, routine is death. I always ask myself: What can we do better?" 

 

Demand management is also deep down when GEALAN is to get a new intranet – a central information platform for all employees. "The desire for this came from the departments, it was a real bottom-up project. They wanted a central entry point, a page where I as an employee have everything at a glance: my appointments, my to-dos, my calendar, apps that I need all the time, news from the management, information from the individual areas, what's going on, what's new – and not only for Germany, but also for all the affiliated companies." As always, the wish list is long. By chance, Ronny Müller comes across a provider that has such a convincing intranet solution that he doesn't look any further: Staffbase. Together with a team from various areas, he convinced the management of the idea; it will be launched in February 2024. Inside.gealan.de – an intranet that should benefit every employee. "For all office employees, GEALAN inside offers quick access to their appointments, GEALAN social media channels, company news, events, etc. But the click will also be worthwhile for colleagues in production. Shift schedules, vacation requests – all of this also comes on GEALAN inside. And then there are communities: Who would like to row in the dragon boat team or strengthen the running team? Who participates in the prediction game? Who wants to carpool me?" 

 

Ronny Müller's drone flies steeply upwards into the sky. A wooded valley opens up directly in front of her, she hovers high above a railway bridge that is more than a hundred years old: silver-white steel construction, five iron bridge pillars, hundreds of steel rivets. At a height of 32 metres, the bridge describes a slight curve over to the other side of the valley. The view of the drone is impressive. Vertically from above, the bridge looks filigree and bold – a beautiful connection. 

 

Management, IT connections, of course, and here, too, a bird's eye view is needed. "We identify digitization gaps and then we fill them." What sounds simple to Ronny Müller is one of the more demanding of his tasks. One of the largest projects in which Demand Management is involved concerns GEALAN toolmaking. It is to get a completely new enterprise resource planning system (ERP, resource/material planning) and a new manufacturing execution system (MES, production control). Both systems will drive digitalization in toolmaking and digitize everything that has been done manually. Ronny Müller analyzes the digitization gap and, although he is just as critical of SAP solutions as he is of all others, recommends an SAP module called SAP PS (project system) in this case. "The question was whether we wanted to set up another ERP system for resource planning or whether we wanted to do it in the existing SAP system and then connect it to the MES via an interface." From Ronny Müller's point of view, the advantages of the SAP solution outweigh the disadvantages. "With portfolio management, finance, controlling, etc., we are in one system, inventories or cash flows do not have to be managed in parallel.   

 

Close-up: Even as a schoolboy, Ronny Müller had an affinity for strategy, logic and mathematics - and an aversion to stagnation. He has been working at GEALAN for 23 years because he feels challenged, learns new things, and can live out his urge to optimise processes. 

 

"A lot has happened in the IT interfaces in recent years. There are more and more modern, smart, resilient solutions. They help us to be more agile." 

 

In addition, the solution gives the toolmaker a free hand: When selecting a pure MES system, he can concentrate on MES functionalities and does not have to look at whether the system also covers ERP. In workshops, the GEALAN team develops the entire process together with the SAP project system provider: What takes place in SAP, which data is transferred to the MES at what point? The ping-pong game between the systems is precisely defined. "The result is a deep interlocking, a really smart process – modern and high-performance," says Ronny Müller, who accompanies the large-scale IT project from start to finish and coordinates it on the SAP side. 

 

The second major IT project concerns production control and work preparation in GEALAN logistics. Here, too, the goal is to close digitization gaps, which in this case means that data may no longer be transferred manually from A to B, for example via Excel. "They say Excel is the number 1 ERP system in the world" – Ronny Müller laughs. "Everyone knits something, but in fact it's like this: An evaluation in Excel can work very well. But you should keep your hands off trying to bring data from Excel into a higher-level system – no one builds interfaces from Excel to another system. And as complex as logistics planning is today, Excel logics are reaching their limits anyway." The new system will be precisely tailored to the processes of GEALAN production, thanks to its own template. "Planning will be more transparent and reproducible." The tailor-made solution will be launched in 2025 and will close a digitalization gap – just like a bridge spans a valley. 

 

The drone hovers over the viaduct, rotates on its own axis and overlooks 360 degrees of the landscape. When Ronny Müller sees demand management as a whole, one third of his work concerns updates to existing systems – two thirds are now completely new solutions. "More and more trends are emerging, new technologies – digitalization, and now as a big new area of artificial intelligence." Ronny Müller does not see risks first, but great opportunities. "AI will be like an assistant for every employee, supporting them. For companies, this means being able to grow without needing more employees – who are also hard to find anymore. AI can also be an acceleration factor." 

 

The drone descends steeply and stops in the air directly in front of Ronny Müller. Her triple zoom brings him closer to a close-up. In his iris, gray, green, brown dots of color. Ronny Müller was born in Zwickau in 1975. When he was a teenager, the word "nerd" didn't exist yet, and so he was just a teenager who liked math and liked to play computers. While others play shooting games, he is enthusiastic about strategy games at an early age. He likes to colonize an entire world, to set up a flourishing trade, to create his own little world. Even here, it is the overview that appeals to him. Later, this preference also decides his choice of study. After graduating from a high school in Gera, he studied industrial engineering at the Jena University of Applied Sciences. "On the one hand, I was interested in business, and on the other hand, technology. So it was exactly the right course of study: broadly based, a broad view of economic relationships, the management of projects and innovations – here, too, I was interested in a bird's eye view. And I also got a good overview of technology, from electrical engineering to assembly programming to the construction of a CPU architecture." Although Ronny Müller's interests haven't changed much, if he were to meet his 21-year-old self today, he would find it hard to believe what he does for a living. When he joined GEALAN immediately after graduating, he first worked as a trainee through all departments – "from controlling to financial accounting, product management to production, I also worked at the extruder, which was all interesting, but I got stuck in logistics." Ronny Müller deepened his Excel skills, which had already been good since his studies, and took on more and more logistics projects, that have to do with IT. "I always ask myself: Can't this be done better? So I familiarized myself more and more with programming in Excel in order to improve scheduling and work preparation. We have continued to develop the Excel spreadsheet that was created in the process. I can't stand still." Ronny Müller becomes Group Leader in Scheduling, then heads Strategic Scheduling, which determines statistically reliable stock sizes and evaluates ranges for the extremely growing GEALAN range. Ronny Müller is also in charge of the major upgrade of the warehouse management system. When SAP became a topic at GEALAN, he trained as a consultant and led the SAP implementation in production planning, dealt with interface design, with the connection of SAP to the warehouse management system – until SAP was officially launched in 2018. Having outgrown logistics, with SAP at a handover point, GEALAN is creating a new field of activity for Ronny Müller in 2019 with demand management. He can bundle his business experience, his affinity for IT and his process knowledge here. "I have been with GEALAN for so long because I have always felt challenged and have always been given new development opportunities. You also need a boss who pushes you a bit – I had that. The switch to IT was a return to the roots, IT already played a role in my studies. I can really express myself with the ever-changing tasks and challenges." 

 

"I always look at the opportunities and potential first. I'll think about the risks later. Otherwise I will never come to a good solution." 

 

Ronny Müller is constantly in action. If not professionally, then privately. He is on vacation in the USA, roams through the mountainous paths of Grand Teton National Park, sees the geysers, canyons and waterfalls of Yellowstone. In Chile he hikes at an altitude of 4500 meters and enjoys the grandeur of the wonder of the world Machu Picchu in Peru. In Europe, he explores the Scottish Highlands and Norwegian fjord landscapes. At home in Germany, Ronny Müller finds relaxation best in Saxon Switzerland, the second home of the Plauen resident by choice. "Hiking boots in the car and off you go, running 20 or 30, sometimes more kilometers. The views there are phenomenal, I sit on a rock for half an hour and soak up the landscape." Here, too, Ronny Müller loves the view of things from above. He often has his drone with him when hiking. Now it lands gently at his feet. The overflight is over for today. We continue with the bird's eye view tomorrow, in the office.