Approaching Digitalization at an SME Manufacturing Service Provider

(a) Situation faced: Listemann Technology AG (Listemann hereafter), a leading industrial service provider for heat treatment, brazing, sintering, electron beam welding, and engineering in the manufacturing industry, invests in new digital solutions to increase the value of its services for its customers. Even though Listemann has a digital production process par excellence, its customer management relies on traditional approaches like telephone calls and emails. As its competitors are also fighting for customers and becoming digital, the importance of Listemann’s maintaining and strengthening its customer relations and using digital technologies to generate business value increases. (b) Action taken: The digitalization project was carried out in four phases, beginning with analysis of the current status and moving on to elaboration of digital potential for Listemann with a focus on processes that have a direct or indirect impact on customers, analysis of the prerequisites for the implementations, and the design and cost estimation of the new web portal and the corresponding data management solution. Several interviews and meetings with the company and external stakeholders were executed. (c) Results achieved: The preliminary results include insights Listemann’s current situation regarding customer contacts, a list of potential solutions and measures to put the customers at the heart of the company’s digitalization strategy, and the new design of a web portal with a new data management solution to improve the company’s communication and interaction with customers. (d) Lessons learned: Major lessons learned from the Listemann case provide insights for other SMEs that face the challenge of keeping up in the digital age, in particular the challenge of digitalizing their customer processes. These six lessons learned can be summarized as (1) be aware of (multiple) context(s), (2) know your customers and manage your processes accordingly, (3) define your digitalization strategy, (4) get everyone on board, (5) create incentives to support the digitalization process, and (6) establish a stepwise approach.