This is already the last presentation of today. Mr. Martin Kolbe of Kühne & Nagel is closing the day with his keynote presentation. Kühne & Nagel is a global logistics network. Mr. Kolbe defines the core asset of Kühne & Nagel as the ability to organize logistic networks for its customers.
The main drive of their business, but also for their IT management is bringing costs down. Besides the cost reduction strategy, they of course also try to enable business through IT according to Mr. Kolbe. In the past 3 years, they reduced their IT costs by 50% - each year!
Supply chain management is of course also a big influence for them. They have to tightly manage it, because for most of their customers, transportation is a commodity service. Digitalizing this business is not always possible, because transportation business is still often paper based. Here, Mr. Kolbe looks forward to more IT applications so that those artifacts can be digitalized, too. For IT, this means it has to become a mediator helping the whole transportation industry to convert.
In their initial IT strategy was to first ensure daily services are running smoothly and to build up a network among stakeholders. In a second step, they then transformed the role of IT into a driver for change.
Interesting, they handle their own custom made software like a product. For example, they have active release cycle management and they push the latest releases to the different installations. Here, they use a lot of automation to make this process work.
I think they really got something to work here. They also just apply the well-known principles like focusing on one process at the time and getting things released, but they manage to put it to work for them.
Participants will now head over to the conference party. This year, the party takes place at Tempodrome. If you happen to be around, make sure to connect to your peers.
Note: Check this overview post to get all links to the other live posts from ProcessWorld 2011 in Berlin