Hamburg, 27 Februar 2018: More than 200 decision-makers from the industrial, administration, finance, and health care sectors accepted the invitation to the valantic visiondays 2018 at the renowned Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg. Under the title “Elements of the digital now.” the managers spent two days discussing not just the visions, opportunities, and risks of the digital transformation, but also focusing on implementation and concrete measures in lectures and workshops. Speakers from companies and organizations such as Allianz, the Swiss apio AG, Berendsohn, IBM, KNAPP, SAP, Sparda Bank Hamburg, Springer Nature, the City of Hamburg, the Techniker Krankenkasse and Thyssen-Krupp Marine Systems, and scientists and top managers of the valantic Group reported about current challenges and the progress of the digital transformation.
“We managers must take the focus away from the future of digitalization and place it increasingly on the now. Companies may not keep putting off urgent tasks in the areas of IT infrastructure and digital processes, and they also require the courage to completely rethink business models. Now the concern is to network oneself, learn from the experiences of others, develop both internal and intra-company forms of cooperation, remove inhibiting structures, and to experiment a bit. The valantic visiondays want to motivate people to do this – and I think we have succeeded,” says Dr. Holger von Daniels, CEO of valantic GmbH, looking back on the successful trade congress.
The opening speech, “Focus on companies: Effects and design of the digital transformation” by Dr. Markus Schlobohm, Division Manager for Corporate Development at Techniker Krankenkasse, set the scene for the event. The TK manager vividly described the predicted radical changes in the health care sector – currently symbolized by the recently-announced entry of the Internet giant Google into the insurance business. But at the same time, this corporate developer indicated which actions TK is already taking in the areas of digital processes, networking, and new services. He warned against reducing the digital transformation to nothing more than the development of disruptive business models and reducing it to examples such as YouTube, Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb. For Schlobohm, depending on the maturity of the company, the introduction of state-of-the-art IT systems, more data transparency, the digital mapping of existing processes, and the development of individual digital add-on services are sensible projects and building blocks of the digital transformation.
This focus on feasibility and implementation ran like a motivating “red thread” through the five parallel sessions with three lectures apiece on the topics of digital leadership, digital roadmap, and digitalization. It quickly became clear that with all the dynamism and uncertainty about future developments, the concern is to prepare companies, structures, processes, and employees now. Thus, Professor Dr. Martin Selchert of the Hochschule Ludwigshafen reported how for projects at medium-sized companies, he helps convince them how to price digital services such as remote support and improved monitoring sensibly and market-appropriately and to justify these prices convincingly in customer meetings. Manuel Eisele of apio AG provided deep insights into his experiences while establishing his joint venture for home automation and energy management. One of the critical success factors: the establishment of a network of strategic partners and suppliers who work closely and very openly with one another, even in case of problems. Prof. Dr. Martin Hill, Vice President & General Manager SAP Digital Supply Chain & IoT MEE at SAP Deutschland also provided examples of cooperation and digitalization in value creation chains in his concluding talk.
The mix of companies, consultants, and solution providers among the speakers, guests, hosts, and sponsors ensured lively discussions in the lectures, in the breaks, and at the information booths of the sponsors IBM, iGrafx, OPAL, and SAP. Many of the speakers called for companies to create more agile structures, to test select new services and technologies through experiments, and to then scale up successful projects rapidly.
In this sense, the valantic Group itself can serve as a successful example. In order to overcome silo thinking and abstract concepts in consulting projects, in recent years, highly specialized, market-leading process and technology consulting companies merged to form the valantic Group. With more than 600 solution experts and software developers, valantic is one of the top addresses for implementation-oriented projects for digital transformation. Even with the concept of the valantic visiondays, the company is tearing down walls: The congress combines the two events novem Business Analytics Forum and the Wassermann Vision Days, expanded to include the group’s entire range of services. At the evening program in the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and on a boat on the Elbe, Holger von Daniels, Martin Hofer (responsible partner for the Competence Center valantic Supply Chain Excellence), and Anastasios Christodoulou (responsible partner for the Competence Center valantic Business Analytics) announced the dates and location of the valantic visiondays 2019 – February 20-21, 2019 in Munich.
In the coming year, there will be another congress and a workshop day. This time, the popular workshops focused on the topics “Steering safely through the digital transformation,” “Standard for all? Successful digital transformation with SAP S/4HANA,” “Digital supply chain with SAP integrated business planning (IBP),” Cognitive analytics, IBM Watson & Bluemix workshops,” “Legal health insurance special – digitalization at the GKV,” and GDPR.
