Transformation should be completed quickly, without getting lost in the minutiae, says Ingo Elfering, group CIO of Fresenius. “It’s better to do it quickly, like taking a Band-Aid off, even if it hurts for a short time,” he summed up at the recent Hamburg IT Strategy Days 2024. So this has been the approach to IT over the past two years, because when Elfering joined Fresenius in July 2020, he was faced with the daunting task of ushering in a new tech era.
Fresenius grew rapidly over the years but the various IT structures were never integrated. Plus, there was the company’s own IT landscape with a self-operated data center in the basement at the headquarters in Bad Homburg, just north of Frankfurt. The result was decentralized, locally fragmented IT components that were only partially interlinked, and in other parts, they only functioned in isolation from each other.
Global IT projects would’ve been difficult to implement in this IT format, he says. In addition, Fresenius experienced security risks first-hand. As a result, Elfering had to ask the question of how to completely reconfigure the company’s IT apparatus.
IT transformation in one big step
Elfering decided to take his bold, big-step approach toward IT transformation rather than move forward in small, incremental ones. This strategy resulted in a long list of projects he pushed forward over two years. Shutting down the company’s data center and moving large parts of it to the cloud was a main priority, which included the SAP landscape that was fragmented into 130 systems. So it was consolidated and migrated from SAP to S/4HANA as part of the RISE program.
Elfering is networked to an SD-WAN, and internal communication and collaboration at Fresenius has also been underpinned with new collaboration tools. The helpdesk, which consists of 27 individual systems, will be successively consolidated into one solution as well.
So after two years of transformation, Elfering is striking a positive balance. “Today, we have effective, cost-effective IT,” he says. “We can react faster.” So what used to take months can now be implemented usually within a few days. As a result, IT is perceived by the business in a completely different way, and not the cumbersome corporate IT of the past.
