Strategy Interview with Daniela Weiss, Senior Vice President Corporate Business Process Management & BPM Lead at GEA Group
Harmonizing 67 active ERP systems and 500 processes for 210 companies is an absolutely Herculean task. To achieve this, GEA Group has set up a dual transformation consisting of global business process management and the introduction of SAP S/4 HANA as the sole ERP system - the largest transformation program in the company's history.
This is a challenge that many companies are currently facing if they want to lay the foundation for far-reaching and successful digitization. In order not to focus solely on the technical or process-related aspects, but not to forget the employees, an unusual change strategy has been chosen: namely, to place people at the center of the change. Without people, the successful implementation of such a project cannot succeed. Processes and systems can be defined, but working together more effectively and efficiently requires more than acceptance.
In our strategy interview, Daniela Weiss, Senior Vice President Corporate Business Process Management & BPM Lead S/4HANA Transformation at GEA Group, tells us how GEA is using co-creation, a collaborative process community and lots of change communication to bring "people, processes and systems into harmony" and how people are having fun in the process.
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Company information
GEA Group is one of the world's largest system suppliers to the food and pharmaceutical industries and is active in over 60 countries. With a product portfolio of machines and plants, sophisticated process technology, components for the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries, GEA is probably - from breakfast to dinner - part of all our daily lives. Headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany, the group employs around 18,200 people worldwide.
Daniela Weiss - Information about the person
Ms. Weiss completed her MBA at the ESB Business School in Reutlingen. After working as a consultant at BearingPoint and Capgemini, she was responsible for the BPM topic at Schuler AG and has been on board as Senior Vice President at GEA since 2019. Here, she is responsible for global end-to-end processes of the entire group globally with her BPM expert team and around 300 process community members from the business 24. In this role, she is also part of the three-person leadership team for the S/4HANA transformation.
The greatest challenges of the increased complexity
GEA Group has a clear purpose: Engineering for a better world. Its drive is to make the world a little bit better every day with its products and services. GEA Group has a long history in this field. The acquisition of various companies with a long tradition is a clear strength of the GEA Group, something they are also proud of. At the same time, however, this fact does not make it any easier to work in a global entity when the growth strategy - Mission 26 - is about more than just the sum of the individual parts. Here, one faces the task of evolved complexities: when Daniela started at GEA in 2019, there were 67 active ERP systems, 500 processes, 210 companies, and no process community or BPM team. The challenging task is to harmonize these 67 active ERP systems with all associated processes across the company into one system by the end of 2025. On the one hand, this is intended to increase control capability, and on the other hand, it is also intended to create the basis for digitization: a single source of digital truth.
In addition to the complexity of the content, the ambitious timeline is certainly one of the biggest challenges here, because the first pilot was to be launched within 15 months during Covid and the entire program was to be delivered by the end of 2025 - that was the promise to the capital market. In addition, for all the technical and process innovations, a core challenge was not only to take the more than 18,200 employees with us, but to build a new GEA together with them.
Why linking BPM and S/4HANA transformation makes sense
Daniela sees the art in particular in not dwelling too long on the past, but rather in looking ahead immediately and, in the sense of a greenfield approach, starting immediately in and with the future. For this purpose, a dual transformation was set up at GEA, consisting of BPM (Business Process Management) and the SAP S/4HANA transformation.
The starting point here is the business processes: with a clear focus on the end-to-end processes and an alignment with the business requirements, the simple procedures and short decision paths are to be streamlined and accelerated so that a high process speed is enabled and ensured, while at the same time still retaining scope for agility and flexibility and promoting transparency. This applies equally to processes in S/4HANA as well as to non-SAP processes and to those processes that are not system-based, with the focus on S/4HANA processes.
From this starting point, the bridge to the system was built directly. S/4HANA allows GEA to get rid of the many different ways of doing the same thing over and over again, while improving the quality of data and increasing transparency to make better decisions. So they've combined the best of both worlds and made good use of the tailwind.
People in the focus of change
For Daniela, people make the decisive difference. A S/4HANA transformation should not be seen as an end in itself, but offers a clear benefit, on the one hand for the business itself and its digitization, as well as the new growth and sustainability strategy. On the other hand, it also benefits each individual employee in their day-to-day work. The aim here is to fill processes with life, develop them further, and make the company and daily work a little better with the help of S/4HANA. However, this cannot be achieved without people and their expertise. The purpose of processes and systems is ultimately to help people do a better job so that they can focus on the things that really matter. The most important thing for Daniela in the process was that her colleagues from the business were on board right from the start so that the transformation could be successfully established - and not just dictated top-down.
Bringing people, processes and systems into harmony
Daniela is convinced that it takes perfect harmony between people, processes and systems for a business to function successfully. Technology will not eliminate existing problems if the people and the processes are missing. The processes create the framework for the people, their doing and their decisions, the systems are used to execute these processes more efficiently. So for efficiency and effectiveness, there needs to be a good balance so that the processes and systems really support the people in the end.
Success factors of the transformation
In the last 1.5 to 2 years, GEA has already achieved a lot to be proud of: Daniela has built up a BPM & Change Management team that now consists of 8 members and is full of passion. She has formed a community in which more than 300 employees from 25 different countries exchange ideas. A BPM Lifecycle was created that maps all business processes - SAP-supported and non-SAP-supported. Together, more than 400 global processes were designed with the help of the BPM Lifecycle.
And all along the way, everyone has had a lot of fun developing it further. The greatest success is to see that people are now gradually bringing the designed processes and the system to life.
Daniela sees the consistent focus on people with the help of 3 C's - co-creation, community and change communication - as a key success factor.
Co-Creation
Right from the start, the new processes were developed together with selected colleagues from divisions, regions and functions. People from different areas of the company, cultures and languages came together to build the future - new processes from GEA for GEA, so to speak.
Community
For Daniela, the community is a strategic network with now more than 300 members around the globe. Here, the community strengthens each other to have confidence in their own abilities and strengthens the empowerment and ownership of the colleagues for the respective processes.
Change communication
Change communication has played an essential role throughout the journey: for example, a language was chosen that everyone in the GEA environment can understand, far from the technical SAP terminology. At the same time, open dialog formats were played with the C-level for the overall big picture and a clear mission.
Daniela emphasizes that such a transformation is only possible with the necessary backing. She sees a decisive success factor in the fact that the support of top management was felt right from the start. She concludes that it is essential to have a clear goal, which creates a framework and clear rules of the game, and at the same time to have room to learn and act flexibly.