Bizerba has led the food sector in weighing, slicing, and labeling for over 150 years.

Every staff at the German company, from sales to HR, follows the motto “stronger together.”

IT, with 150 people worldwide, is no different.

Dr. Christian Hürter, Director of Global IT, began in February 2021.

Dr. Hürter oversees the outstanding IT staff, 100 of whom are situated at Bizerba’s headquarters near Stuttgart, Germany, and 50 worldwide.

Dr. Hürter claimed he would “lift IT to the next level” at Bizerba using two pillars.

“We want to reach the next level in terms of standardised architecture, enabling a stable development application-wise,” says Dr. Hürter.

We are following worldwide IT standards with one pillar. Gartner is helping us set those standards.”

On the other hand, we have six strategic projects to elevate Bizerba. These include business relationship management, as we must be business-centric, and IT performance management, which means being transparent and shifting focus from running IT to growing and transforming business with IT.

With those two foundations, we are growing as a worldwide team.”

Bizerba—stronger together.

Dr. Hürter stresses the necessity of “stronger together.” Thus, Bizerba’s “MyBizerba” program has spread the phrase.

MyBizerba offers a wide range of services to meet clients’ needs due to its many specialties. Technical training and comprehensive maintenance and support are included.

“MyBizerba means we create unique solutions for unique people, combining functionalities like advisory services, hardware and software products, accessories, services, and financial services in this ‘stronger together’ thinking,” explains Dr. Hürter. “Because we are a global company in several countries, our people must collaborate to find a solution for our customers. In IT, we see this everywhere.

We’re business-centric, so IT prioritizes customer demands and works with Bizerba to meet them.

“Being a large, mid-sized business, and given the scale of our products and global footprint, it’s all about taking this asset as an advantage and combining different people and knowledge to come up with solutions. Our everyday work.”

New obstacles

Dr. Hürter and his IT staff must adapt to quickly changing company needs.

Sustainability, digital transformation, and the “war for talent”—the digital skills gap—are his main difficulties.

Dr. Hürter adds, “We are seeing some important changes around us and I think it’s important that, in IT, we are grasping what’s happening on the market. “We have influences like sustainability, which is just taking off, and we need to take care of that everywhere in the company, including IT.

“This war for talent is definitely affecting us in the IT organization; we need to continuously ensure that we have the right capabilities and stay ahead of our competitors in the market.”

New business strategies and culinary and retail developments are also creating challenges.

Self-checkout supermarkets and client payment methods are becoming more widespread.

Dr. Hürter continues, “Bizerba is partnering with a start-up called SuperSmart, which is coming up with brilliant solutions for supporting self-checkout for large and small product bunches.

We’re seeing more people prepared to pay simply for services. Thus, subscription business models are increasing.”

Gartner’s I&T operational model, which Bizerba uses to drive digital transformation, goes beyond IT.

Digital transformation, another example of “stronger together,” is now part of a company’s DNA rather than a department.

Bizerba “rebuilding better” after cyberattack

Dr. Hürter acknowledges that Bizerba is recovering from a devastating cyber assault last June.

Restoring fundamental capabilities took weeks, while building a new IT environment took months.

The firm learned and “built back better,” strengthening its worldwide infrastructure, including networks, servers, cloud, and security. “We weren’t bad before and were performing pretty well,” says Dr. Hürter.

But we were struck and are learning from it and growing substantially on every element. Even if we were good a year ago, we are far better now. Since the attack, we’re advancing quicker than expected.”

Dr. Hürter even calls security his “favorite” element of the work.

He compares security to a fence around Bizerba that must be uniformly high.

Dr. Hürter says stockholders demand a high fence height.

“Our job in IT is to make sure we have the same fence height throughout the company, and my colleague, the Chief Information Security Officer, inspects the fence.”

GPOs and IT-BRMs matter.

Bizerba’s Director Global IT argues that his team adds value to business operations.

The global process owner (GPO) helps with this, according to Deloitte.

Dr. Hürter deems this “absolutely crucial” and says his team is working closely with Bizerba’s GPO through an IT Business Relationship Manager (IT-BRM) established at the start of last year.

“The important thing is that the GPO and IT-BRM are in close contact, so the IT-BRM can understand and fulfill the needs of the GPO, and consult the GPO on their way of digitally transforming the business,” he says.

Strong partnerships

Bizerba’s IT department collaborates with several partners on manufacturing and transformation processes.

Again, this embodies the company’s “stronger together” philosophy.

“I think today you cannot compete in the transformation and production of an IT organization when you need to invent everything,” says Dr. Hürter. “It would be stupid to ignore partners’ multiple experiences and sometimes their market size. These valuable partners have additional resources or specializations.

When you have long-term relationships with partners, it’s vital and “stronger together.”

He also notes the inclination toward long-term partnerships for stability and success.

Dr. Hürter adds, “We are investing and concentrating on a few very good partners, and I think that’s a trend in the market.”
“We need to work together longer.”

Bizerba’s ecosystem partner All for One Group helps the firm move to SAP’s S/4HANA ERP software.

“All for One was our preferred partner for this transition,” Dr. Hürter says. “All for One has been our basic support partner.

They are our project and transformation partner for our S/4HANA migration. And why? All for One knows our demands and can advise us individually, but they also have extensive industry expertise and provide us guidelines and best practices to handle corporate transformation.”

HPE is another key partner.

Dr. Hürter says HPE is providing storage and compute for our data center, but they are also infrastructure issue solvers and valuable consultants on our hybrid cloud move.

He calls hybrid cloud transition Bizerba’s “stepwise move from processing data in proprietary data centres to a hybrid cloud,” offered and maintained outside Bizerba.

Dr. Hürter says, “We are not in a hurry during this transition phase. Because mistakes are costly, choosing the proper path and making the appropriate migration decisions is more critical. HPE prevents such errors.”