The Company

A machine and plant manufacturer with more than 1,000 employees. Development and production in Germany. Sales and service offices worldwide.

The Challenge

For several years now, the company has been undergoing the transformation from being a product provider to becoming a solution provider that delivers software-driven solutions for the entire customer process beyond the pure functionality of the hardware. Product management has been installed centrally in order to meet the requirements of the market and to crystallise what is technologically feasible into what makes economic sense.
Product management should become the “essential driver” for developing standardised solutions until they are “ready to sell”. The new division is faced with the challenge of bundling and prioritising the requirements of all the internal and external stakeholders and, from this, deriving concrete concepts for marketable solutions. In order to tackle this multitude of tasks systematically, DIGITALTRANSFER was commissioned to develop the “Product Management 2025” divisional strategy along with a roadmap for its implementation.

The Performance

A qualitative analysis involving all of the employees in the division, management and internal customers shows that there is no clarity as to what the role as the “central driver” of the decision-making authority entails. Furthermore, the horizontal networking of product management in the specialist departments is inhibited through the organisation into functions that do not provide for institutionalised cross-functional collaboration. Even within product management there is little exchange and transfer of knowledge between those responsible for the various product and technology divisions. The historically evolved, heterogeneous IT landscape contributes to the fact that information is either not available or not shared. 

The divisional strategy therefore focuses initially upon:

• clarifying the internal mandate and communicating this to the organisation,
• restructuring and further developing the internal set-up of the division with regard to roles, methods, and competencies as well as
• redefining, rolling out and practising cross-divisional cooperation within the product development process together with all stakeholders.

In a second step, the organisational development is followed by the introduction of empirical models and methods for the measurement of customer needs (such as the Kano model) and for the analysis of the market environment (such as the growth-share matrix) as well as the necessary adaptation of the IT landscape for this. 

Based on the consolidated product and market data, the third phase will see the expansion of the product portfolio into a range of solutions comprising software and service components: The empirical analysis of customer needs on the one hand and competitive development on the other allows product management, in close cooperation with sales and innovation management, to launch the first successful standard solution systems.

The Result

• Product management has the power to act through a direct CEO mandate 
• The definition of a product development process which is accepted by all stakeholders for the first time in the company’s history
• Broad acceptance of the newly developed products and systems in the organisation, especially in sales,
  • as the “divisional homework” was done in the first step within product management through further training and restructuring,
  • and as all stakeholders were systematically and continuously involved in the new product development process
• Success for the newly developed products and systems on the market through the initial consolidation and analysis of all product, customer and market data that was previously not or only partially available
• Product management gains significance within the organisation: Substantial increase in resources, especially for new jobs

Keywords

divisional strategy, product management, product management strategy, expansion of product portfolio, product development process, development of standard solution systems, empirical management, BCG matrix, growth-share matrix, Kano model, cross-functional collaboration

The Company

The EMEA headquarters of a mechanical and plant engineering company in southern Germany, with its head office in America and several production sites in Germany and other countries; more than 10,000 employees worldwide. 

The Challenge

The EMEA headquarters, with 300 employees in development, IT, marketing and sales, is – like many other companies – forced by the Corona crisis in spring 2020 to relocate the majority of the jobs from its headquarters to the home office. As the organisation has little experience with remote work, DIGITALTRANSFER is commissioned to develop and implement a remote work concept.

The Performance

1. Analysis of the current and target situation with respect to remote work
In step 1, a survey of the managers with the following results:

• There is a distinct culture of presence, all employees have so far worked together in open-plan offices, home office working was only granted in exceptional cases and then limited to a maximum of one day per week; the organisation has little experience with remote work
• During the lockdown, a transition was made to 100 percent remote work
• Communication and work processes are experienced as disorganised, confusing, and ineffective
• There is a desire for a uniform and pragmatic framework for “remote” working, rapid introduction of this framework, and close monitoring of its implementation
• The managers and their teams have no experience of working in distributed teams. Nor do they have any experience with the frameworks and tools of “Management 3.0”, which are fundamental to decentralised cooperation

In step 2, an analysis of the IT infrastructure and the available tools with the following results: 

• In Office 365 Professional, the central IT department has been providing a tool for remote work for some time now. The software has been made available to every employee, but has so far only been used sporadically by individual employees
• Most teams still work using local server structures and communicate by email
• Since the central IT department had no concept for the introduction of Office 365 Professional, its introduction has so far been a failure from their point of view 

2. Design of a specific framework for working in and with teams that are “distributed” in terms of their place of work, working time, field of expertise and hierarchical position within the organisation. The framework is based on the methods and tools of “Management 3.0”, tailored to the specific requirements of the company.

To this end, a workshop is conducted for the management team,

1. in order to align the requirements of the managers with those of their teams and to create a mutually agreed concept for a remote model, and
2. in order to compare how the resulting working methods can be implemented in the existing IT infrastructure using Office 365 Professional; including
   • an introduction to the functional logic of Office 365 Professional and its underlying framework for work processes and methods, especially Scrum
   • the adaptation of Scrum to the needs of the management team and the definition of a hybrid agile model to define the working practices necessary for the effective and efficient use of Office 365 Professional

3.Pilot

• Recruitment of a volunteer, technically skilled team to test the Office 365 utilisation concept for remote work for one week as part of a pilot phase
• At the end of the week, the pilot team and the management team jointly revise the concept in a workshop

Roll-out

• Kick-off meetings with all teams
• Appointment of mentors in the team who can help their colleagues quickly and easily with technical problems
• Continual 1:1 sparring over three months for all members of the management team in order to solve problems arising from the use of the new tool and integrate the new working methods into everyday working life rapidly
• Team coaching every fortnight for three months in order to consolidate the new routines and to resolve any resulting challenges and conflicts in a timely manner

The Result

• Within three weeks of the lockdown caused by Covid-19, the successful transition from “presence culture” to “remote work” for 300 employees was achieved by means of a process and methodology framework tailored to the organisation, enabling remote work for all teams based on Office 365 
• High acceptance and rapid integration through 
  • intermeshing the IT tool Office 365 Professional with the necessary supporting communication and work processes 
  • adaptation to the requirements of the company 
    • at management level in the concept phase
    • at team level in the test phase as part of a pilot project
• After three months, the management is highly satisfied with the increased initiative and self-management on the part of the employees due to remote work 
• Satisfaction of the central IT department, as Office 365 Professional has been introduced into the company with a successful use case
• As the advantages of flexible working have become clear, the new working method introduced in the remote model will remain as the “New Normal Working Model” even after the lockdown

Keywords

Management 3.0, Scrum, remote work, corona crisis, Covid-19, decentralised work, distributed teams, New Normal Working Model, Office 365 Professional, Office 365 roll-out concept

The Company

Internationally active mechanical engineering company based in the DACH region. 1,500 employees, several production sites worldwide. Sales and service in more than 30 countries, controlled by regional companies.

 
The Challenge

The company has launched a new product – its first new development in many years and of great strategic importance for the company’s positioning. The technical concept fills a niche in the market, the technical implementation is promising, the planned sales figures are high.
However, after two years on the market, the targets are nowhere near being met, with sales significantly below their forecast. An internal investigation of the possible causes has not produced any results. DIGITALTRANSFER is commissioned to analyse the reasons for the failure so far and thus create the basis for a successful relaunch of the product.

 
The Performance

The root cause analysis for the failure of the product should focus on the area of marketing: An internal survey has shown that the sales department has hardly requested or used any marketing materials in the past 24 months. 

After reviewing all the available documents (positioning and marketing strategy, sales training and materials, technical documents, SWOT analysis), it becomes clear that all the business areas involved, and above all the customers, need to be consulted. This results in the following procedure:

Qualitative Analysis

• 15 one-hour qualitative interviews with internal experts from development, marketing, sales and service (including the Chief Technical Officer, sales directors of the most important international regions, “super-sellers” with good sales figures for the product, head of development, responsible marketing managers)
• 15 qualitative interviews with customers who have bought the new product in the past 24 months
• Merging of internal and external perspectives and crystallisation of the focus areas for the relaunch 

Quantitative Analysis

• Review and weighting of the qualitatively determined focus areas for the relaunch in an online survey of all sales employees

The analysis – especially the customer perspective – shows that the previous sales approach for the product does not work and leads to considerable problems for the customer:

• Up to now, the product – like the rest of the portfolio – has been sold as a “stand-alone machine” that performs its function independently without being connected to a higher-level system
• However, the new product logic requires intelligent embedding in the customer’s process landscape, especially in the software environment 
• If this embedding is not anticipated at the planning stage, the customer can experience massive problems, even leading to machine failure
• These problems have been attributed by the installation team and service personnel to technical issues with the product, which could not be satisfactorily localised and resolved
• The resulting loss of confidence in the product on the part of the sales staff has led to the regional sales companies no longer implementing head office marketing campaigns in order to avert further damage and not to jeopardise the company’s reputation through further defective installations

The relaunch concept therefore focuses on enabling the sales staff to sell the new product successfully in both the short and long term:

• Step 1: Pilot project with top salesperson, responsible sales director, and customer to develop a scenario for a prototypical system embedding including an integrated service offer 
• Step 2: International roll-out as the first standard system 
• Step 3: Medium and long-term repositioning in sales and marketing
  • Establishment of standard system sales guilds as “Communities of Practice” for the sale of standard systems
    • Development of a personality requirement profile for system consulting and sales
    • Internal and external call for applications for the guild
    • Establishment of system sales guilds in all sales companies
  • Realignment of market intelligence and marketing strategy 
    • Improved segmentation of new customers: It is not an industry per se that is meaningful, but the degree of maturity of an industry; because the new product can only be successfully used once a certain degree of maturity has been reached which makes automation economically viable
• Step 4: Measurement of success and adjustment

The Result

• The standard system was successfully launched onto the market within three months
• Sales of the product doubled within six months
• Long-term restructuring of the sales organisation for standard system sales successfully implemented within 12 months

Keywords

Product Launch, Product Relaunch, Customer Insights, Market Intelligence, Standard System Sales, Guilds, Community of Practice