"We win as a team"

Mr. Kreft, your company UNIORG has been bringing SAP to companies for 50 years. Converting GEALAN to SAP – was that a routine job for you? No, it's really never routine. UNIORG has been advising GEALAN's parent company VEKA for a long time, but GEALAN is GEALAN: the processes are somewhat different. That's why a precise process analysis was so important at the beginning. We didn't just impose a solution, but took a detailed look at how GEALAN works, what special features and wishes there are. You shouldn't think of UNIORG coming into the house and quickly bringing SAP with you – that's a big deal that takes time, and above all, it's a team effort. 

And the team worked well from your point of view? Absolutely, that was fun. In this case, there is our customer GEALAN, there is its parent company VEKA and there is us – we advise, moderate, find solutions. It was important to build trust in this team of three, to know each other, to know who can do what well – that's the only way to get things together. You can always manage the software somehow, but it only works really well as a team. It takes the personal level, this spirit, to want to move forward together. 

Nevertheless, there are always discussions, challenges. Of course, there were even many discussions at the beginning: Should GEALAN get its own SAP client or not? How is the warehouse management system, which is not an SAP solution, integrated? Then GEALAN attached great importance to ensuring that nothing visibly changed in terms of pricing, that everything remained as usual for customers. Basically, the question always arises as to the extent to which we want to achieve standardization with SAP and where it makes sense to deviate from the standard. Financial accounting is highly standardized, but the closer you get to the customer, to production or logistics, the more individual it becomes. There was a long and hard discussion. But these discussions bring something: Only in this way have we found the best way together. 

They are convinced that simply imposing SAP on top of SAP is not possible. Why not? Because SAP is only used optimally when knowledge is created in the company. Basically, we are enablers, as we enable companies like GEALAN to work competently with SAP and to become competent themselves. This requires a team of key users who continue their education and help develop solutions. GEALAN was willing to invest money in training from the very beginning, and this has been noticeable. This is money well spent; otherwise you may have a state-of-the-art SAP system later on, which you only use ten percent. SAP is a cut for all people, and it doesn't immediately bring huge advantages in everyday work for everyone. If this is a black box that I don't understand, I won't go along with it. That's why it's essential to awaken understanding, to take people with you. It takes longer, but it's more sustainable. Generating know-how, especially in young minds, so that everyone really steps on the gas and contributes their ideas – GEALAN has done that extremely well. 

Hans-Peter Kreft, born in 1964 in Versmold, East Westphalia, is an SAP believer. After his training as an industrial clerk, he went to evening school for two years and completed his industrial specialist. He works in various industrial companies in the IT environment of materials management, production and logistics and is constantly undergoing further training. As he became more and more confronted with SAP, he wanted to work with it himself: in 1990, he started working at VEKA in SAP application development, where he became the head of it. In 2004, he moved to UNIORG AG, which he now heads as one of four managing directors. UNIORG has almost 250 employees, is based in Dortmund, has eight other offices in Germany and abroad and takes its slogan seriously: "Consulting with passion". 

The day the switch is flipped and SAP goes live is exciting for companies. Everything has to go smoothly. Yes. GEALAN lives from its customers, has to sell products and the customer should, of course, only notice improvements, if at all. One hears of companies where no goods can be delivered for a week or no invoice arrives for three weeks. That couldn't happen. The customer had to be supplied from the first SAP day, invoices had to go out. To ensure this, we invested a lot of time and energy, carried out various integration tests and involved the specialist departments. 

How important is good support at this stage? The four to eight weeks after the go-live are very important. It's like buying a car. I've been looking forward to my new car for a long time, great looks. Now I'll pay 40,000 euros for it, then I'll get the car – then I'll first look: Was that the right decision? It's the same here, the decision has to prove itself. You can't suddenly find yourself alone with problems and fall into a hole. That's why we're at gunpoint in this hypercare phase. If companies save on this support, then I discuss with them because that's the wrong end. 

What do you prefer: advising a solid medium-sized company or a young, wild start-up? Both. Of course, there is a difference between advising a start-up that is growing quickly and wants to be very agile in e-commerce, which acts differently than a long-established production company, where the structures in the specialist departments are very stable; there is a lot of experience, but perhaps some things are already too well-known. I prefer it when I have a department head who sets the strategy, but who perhaps also has a dual student who says, IT is my topic, here I can transform something. In the past, department heads often thought they automatically had to be the key user, but today it's different, it's about commitment, not position.   

How to bring knowledge from the old, experienced minds to the young, inexperienced is a topic that concerns you. Very much. I've been working in IT for 40 years now and still have ambitions to make a difference. I don't like stagnation and boredom. But there are things where others are faster than me. At UNIORG, we have managed to develop a second generation, perhaps even a third. It is essential for survival to pass on knowledge. Even today, there are still excellent trainees and highly motivated people in Germany. You may have to search a little longer, but there are them, and it's fun with them. In my job, I am sometimes a kindergarten teacher, sometimes a doorman, i.e. a door opener, sometimes a de-escalator when there is a fire somewhere. And then there's the topic of strategy: I think it's wonderful to see how people develop, to see that someone is better than me in this area. I don't want to have the worse people, but the better ones.   

Seeing companies become more efficient: Are these the fruits of your labor? Absolute. Yesterday, while cleaning up, I came across a VEKA annual report from 2005, and when I see what the turnover was then and what is now – it's nice to help develop it. There are many new projects at GEALAN. GEALAN has introduced the Staffbase software tool for internal communication. This has nothing to do with SAP, but it is a state-of-the-art tool for corporate communication and looks really good. The fact that they are now thinking about SAP products in the HR field, about SuccessFactors, about the Ariba purchasing catalogue software, that they have a really good, high-performance shop for customers, that they have an EDI connection for orders, that they approach data evaluation with Celonis, that they design the evaluation themselves with the SAP Analytics Cloud – GEALAN is really at the forefront of this. What I see at GEALAN is simply the openness to want to improve, and that is always the beginning of success. I like to compare it to the Beetle at VW. At some point he had exhausted all forms of therapy, then there had to be the Golf. I don't know whether the Golf 1 was already better than the last Beetle. But a new platform was formed on which to build the future. 

You are alluding to the changeover to SAP S/4HANA, which took place at GEALAN in January 2024. What will be better with the latest SAP generation? At first, obviously hardly anything. SAP has announced that it will no longer support ECC (an SAP enterprise resource planning software, editor's note) beyond 2027. So it was a must to go on S/4. But the real benefits can be seen not a few months after the changeover. Okay, the interfaces look fancier, I can see my vacation request better in Fiori apps. But I'll say bluntly: In the first step, nothing has improved for the users. However, S/4 is a great platform for the future, with which you can act faster, with which you can increase performance, where there are more cloud components. AI, dashboards, data mining products, etc. can build on this – that will become important. S/4 is the basis for further development, and GEALAN is also very active in designing interfaces in the future, implementing dashboards and self-services, simplifying analyses and redesigning processes more quickly. It's about agility, also about making it easier to implement new companies. 

The cooperation between UNIORG and GEALAN continues? Yes. The next step is the SAP rollout at GEALAN Baltic on 1 January 2025. Now that we have looked after GEALAN in Germany and a whole range of affiliated companies, the effort will of course be lower. This is also because GEALAN now has experience with SAP itself. And we're not the ones who want to be in the same company with a lot of people all the time. What we do is help people to help themselves. 

Nevertheless, long-term, stable customer relationships are something that satisfies you? That's not only satisfying, it's also super cool to bring something forward together, even in the long term. I see with many of our customers: Where did they stand 20 years ago and where do they stand now? Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I like to see what we've achieved.