#18 "People, processes, and systems in perfect harmony"
This episode was recorded in German.
Harmonizing 67 active ERP systems and close to 500 processes across 210 companies is a herculean task. GEA Group set up a dual transformation to pull it off: global business process management plus the rollout of SAP S/4HANA as the single ERP system, the largest transformation program in the company's history.
It's a challenge many companies face right now when they want to lay the foundation for far-reaching, successful digitalization. To avoid focusing purely on the technical or process side and losing sight of the people, GEA chose an unusual change strategy: putting people at the center of the transformation. No project of this scale succeeds without people. Processes and systems can be mandated, but working together more effectively and efficiently takes more than acceptance.
In our strategy interview, Daniela Weiss, Senior Vice President Corporate Business Process Management & BPM Lead S/4HANA Transformation at GEA Group, explains how GEA brings "people, processes, and systems into harmony" through co-creation, a collaborative process community, and a lot of change communication, and how people manage to enjoy it along the way.
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About the company
GEA Group is one of the world's largest system suppliers to the food and pharmaceutical industries and operates in more than 60 countries. With a portfolio of machinery and plants, sophisticated process technology, and components for the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries, GEA is probably part of all of our daily lives, from breakfast to dinner. Headquartered in Düsseldorf, the group employs around 18,200 people worldwide.
Daniela Weiss: about the person
Weiss earned her MBA at ESB Business School in Reutlingen. After working as a consultant at BearingPoint and Capgemini, she took charge of BPM at Schuler AG and has been on board at GEA as Senior Vice President since 2019. There, together with her team of BPM experts and around 300 process community members from the business, she is responsible for 24 global end-to-end processes across the entire group. In this role, she is also part of the three-person leadership team driving the S/4HANA transformation.
The biggest challenges of accumulated 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 here. Acquiring various companies with long traditions is a clear strength of GEA Group, and one it's proud of. At the same time, that history doesn't make it any easier to operate as a global organization when the growth strategy, Mission 26, is about more than the sum of the individual parts. That means dealing with complexity that has built up over time: 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 demanding task is to harmonize those 67 active ERP systems and all associated processes across the company into a single system by the end of 2025. The goal is to improve the ability to steer the business and to create the basis for digitalization: a single source of digital truth.
Alongside the substantive complexity, the ambitious timeline is certainly one of the biggest challenges. The first pilot was supposed to go live within 15 months, during Covid, and the entire program delivered by the end of 2025, as promised to the capital market. On top of all the technical and process innovations, a core challenge was not just to bring more than 18,200 employees along, but to build a new GEA together with them.
Why linking BPM and the S/4HANA transformation makes sense
For Daniela, the real skill lies in not dwelling on the past for too long, but looking ahead immediately and starting in and with the future, in the spirit of a greenfield approach. To do that, GEA set up a dual transformation consisting of BPM (business process management) and the SAP S/4HANA transformation.
Business processes are the starting point. With a clear focus on end-to-end processes and alignment with business requirements, simple procedures and short decision paths are streamlined and accelerated. That enables and ensures high process speed while preserving room for agility and flexibility and increasing transparency. This applies equally to processes in S/4HANA, to non-SAP processes, and to processes that aren't system-supported, though the focus is on the S/4HANA processes. From that starting point, the bridge to the system was built directly. S/4HANA lets GEA get rid of the many different ways of doing the exact same thing while improving data quality and increasing transparency to make better decisions. That's how they combined the best of both worlds and made good use of the tailwind.
People at the center of change
For Daniela, people make the decisive difference. An S/4HANA transformation isn't an end in itself. It delivers a clear benefit, both for the business and its digitalization and for the new growth and sustainability strategy. And it also delivers for every single employee's day-to-day work. The task is to bring processes to life, develop them further, and use S/4HANA to make the company and daily work a little bit better. But that doesn't happen without people and their expertise. Ultimately, the purpose of processes and systems is to help people do a better job so they can focus on the things that really matter. What mattered most to Daniela in the process was having colleagues from the business on board from day one so the transformation could take hold, rather than being dictated top-down.
Bringing people, processes, and systems into harmony
Daniela is convinced that a company only works well when people, processes, and systems are in perfect harmony. Technology won't fix existing problems if the people and the processes are missing. Processes create the framework for what people do and decide; systems are used to execute those processes more efficiently. Efficiency and effectiveness require a good balance so that processes and systems genuinely support people in the end.
Success factors of the transformation
Over the past 18 months to two years, GEA has already achieved a lot to be proud of. Daniela has built a BPM & change management team that now has eight members and works with real passion. She has created a community where more than 300 employees from 25 different countries exchange ideas. A BPM lifecycle was launched that covers all business processes, both SAP-supported and not. Using that lifecycle, more than 400 global processes were designed together. And everyone had a lot of fun developing along the way. The biggest success is seeing people gradually bring the designed processes and the system to life.
Daniela sees consistent focus on people as the key success factor, driven by three C's: co-creation, community, and change communication.
Co-creation
From the very beginning, the new processes were developed together with selected colleagues from divisions, regions, and functions. People from different business areas, cultures, and languages came together to build the future, creating new processes by GEA for GEA.
CommunityFor Daniela, the community is a strategic network with more than 300 members around the globe by now. The community helps its members build confidence in their own abilities and strengthens colleagues' capability and ownership for their respective processes.
Change communication
Change communication played a key role throughout the entire journey: for example, the team chose language that everyone at GEA could understand, far removed from technical SAP jargon. At the same time, open dialogue formats with the C-level conveyed the big picture and a clear mission.
Daniela emphasizes that a transformation like this is only possible with the necessary backing. She sees it as a decisive success factor that top management's support was noticeable from day one. Finally, she notes that it is essential to have a clear goal that creates a framework and clear rules of the game, while leaving room to learn and act flexibly.