The savvy shopper

“When everything is going well in our purchasing department, no one actually notices that we exist. But when there’s a problem, our phones very quickly start ringing”, says Rebecca Fichtelmann and laughs. She and her seven-person materials management team work every day to provide GEALAN with everything the company needs to run successfully and smoothly. The goods receiving department in Oberkotzau with two further employees is also part of Fichtelmann’s department. Purchases are made in three different areas: raw materials, commodities and consumables. “We buy our main raw material PVC, but also all additives: modifiers and titanium dioxide, for instance, but also sealing material. Commodities include steel profiles, for example. Consumables include everything we need internally – from safety shoes and screws to disposable towels for the toilets. In addition, we look after travel management”

Rarely seen resource scarcity

GEALAN’s shopping list is very specific. In normal times, the challenge is to get every item in maximum quality at the best price – a task Rebecca Fichtelmann relishes: “Every day in the purchasing department is exciting. When we have lengthy discussions and then achieve the optimum result for GEALAN – that makes me really happy”. Since 2020, however, it has become more complicated to source raw materials: “The company is experiencing enormous growth, which is of course great – our turnover in the first half of 2021 was up 35 percent year on year! On the other hand, the materials we need have been in very short supply since the end of 2020”, Fichtelmann says. “I spoke to a colleague who has known the PVC market for 25 years and asked: What’s going on? I just don’t believe it. He said: There’ve been supply problems before, but never to this extent”. Being a buyer for GEALAN is a job that requires professionalism and certain amount of nerve.

The coronavirus pandemic is sweeping through every market like a hurricane and shaking up supply chains; but that isn’t the only challenge, according to Fichtelmann’s analysis: “In the steel sector, blast furnaces were shut down and our steel suppliers experienced bottlenecks. In the PVC sector, we had force majeure notifications from our PVC manufacturer and there were major outages. In some cases, maintenance work was going on at the PVC manufacturers and production was at a standstill. Volumes produced in advance had already been allocated – demand is simply off the charts”. In the US, frosts set in, storms raged, and entire PVC plants broke down, putting even more pressure on plants in Europe.

At the same time, the pandemic paralysed logistics: “Delivery dates were delayed, haulage companies suddenly had problems with coronavirus controls at the borders. Trucks were held up because their drivers tested positive”. These are unpredictable global events that impact European markets and affect the way GEALAN does its shopping. Keeping an eye on the bigger picture in all of this and planning realistically: that is the real art of purchasing.

Huge price increases as a result

“We experienced enormous price increases. With suppliers, this culminated in a take it or leave it attitude – prices were no longer even negotiated. Even today, our focus is less and less on prices and more and more on generating security of supply”. Despite this situation, GEALAN’s demand for each and every one of its raw materials does not diminish for a second: they are preferably sourced from Germany, and the quality is permanently tested by the company’s in-house research & development department. Long-standing partnerships with raw material suppliers are more important than ever in order to jointly drive material innovations and are cultivated accordingly. “Of course we discuss all the specifications with the specialist departments. After all, they are the experts, but prices, payment terms and delivery times are negotiated by the purchasing department. We interact a lot with our affiliated companies abroad, send materials back and forth, and make use of our network. As a result, we’ve grown closer together and operate more internationally”

In times of the pandemic, travel management is almost non-existent, and if things weren’t so crazy, this might be seen as a positive development – a relief for the purchasing department, which would otherwise be responsible for every flight and hotel booking. While the raw materials market worldwide is in turmoil, in Tanna and Oberkotzau the devil is sometimes in the detail: “For example, we ran out of adhesive tape. We can’t pack our containers without adhesive tape, then the foil blows off the containers in Tanna. What we needed was a quick solution: our adhesive tape must be transparent, UV-stable and highly adhesive. This forces us to deal with product specifications quickly and in a targeted manner”.

No downtime thanks to intra-Group coordination 

When it comes to raw materials shortages, the challenge for the purchasing department lies in the word “nevertheless”: raw materials must be available nevertheless, the silos for the mixing plant must be full, the extruders have to run. “Raw materials are the number one priority for us. Everything else comes after but must also be considered. And sometimes, we have to bring the chaos under control”.

Rebecca Fichtelmann’s strategy is called: coordination. A word that the Head of Purchasing uses sixteen times in our GEANOVA interview – internal coordination to jointly order raw materials – with the production and R & D departments. “The more we are bombarded by new dispatches and breaking news from the markets, the more we strengthen our coordination meetings”

Rebecca Fichtelmann someone who refers to problems as challenges. She has a talent for organisation, also in her private life. When it comes to her circle of friends deciding where to go on holiday or where to go on an outing, or what event to attend, she’s the one who takes care of everything. Although she would dispute that there is such a thing as a natural talent for purchasing, it is a fact that her father was also the purchasing manager in a medium-sized company. Rebecca Fichtelmann is an early bird who doesn’t procrastinate, and she sees what she has started through to the end. Her professional career proves that: After secondary school and technical college, she wrote a single application – for an apprenticeship as an industrial clerk at GEALAN, on the off-chance. She had a good feeling as soon as she entered the company through the glass tower. During the interview, she sensed that the chemistry was right, and was promptly hired. In 2007, she began her training in the purchasing department, to which she remained loyal apart from a brief stint in sales. She was subsequently taken on. “I found the work in the purchasing department interesting and challenging from the outset. I liked the contacts internally and externally and could work independently – no two days were the same. But the thought of studying never left me”. So, in addition to her full-time job, Rebecca Fichtelmann first completed a distance learning course to become a business administrator. She then began studying business administration at Hof University of Applied Sciences in the evening: “It was important to me to study, but not to leave GEALAN in order to do so. My boss and the whole department stood behind me and supported me, otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible”. For four years, she motivated herself after a full working day and on weekends to study a demanding course and successfully completed it – thus Rebecca Fichtelmann’s bachelor’s degree documents not only her expertise, but also her determination and talent for keeping many balls in the air at the same time.

At GEALAN, she managed the SAP implementation in materials management and monitored the project with her bachelor’s thesis. “We were a young team; we were given a lot of trust”. To start with SAP, the purchasing department recorded all actual processes and developed a target concept. Processes became leaner and more purposeful. All materials management tasks were digitalised and became almost paperless, an archiving system for delivery notes and order confirmations was installed that everyone could access, a contract database and procurement controlling followed once the interfaces to the other departments were functioning. “That was the nice thing, that we worked across the board, everyone developed and tested together. The go-live was on 1 January 2019 – that was a really exciting day for all of us”. SAP is Rebecca Fichtelmann’s first major project, and it went well. She became a group leader and, in January 2021, at the age of 33, department head for materials management. The glass ceiling that women often come up against when forging a career is not something she has encountered at GEALAN.

Rebecca Fichtelmann is new in her management position, but has spent many years in the purchasing team, of which she expressly sees herself as a part. This team, she firmly believes, is the reason why it not only manages to weather stormy times, but also enjoys its work. “We’ve grown together immensely during this time of crisis. Despite the distance we had to maintain, the feelings of closeness and team spirit are stronger than ever. Everyone understands the other, everyone speaks their mind, and we are firmly convinced: together we can do anything”.