At the beginning of 2020, Jörg Hackmann and Harald Henning were appointed as new directors at PSI Metals. In an interview, the two of them, together with Thomas Quinet, Managing Director since 2017, answer questions about their strategy and what their dreams are for PSI Metals.
Over the last decade I accompanied in several management positions already the transition of our company into a more and more product based business approach. By taking over the new role as Managing Director we are now emphasizing the importance of our product strategy even more. This comes along with a strong focus on increasing our business and application consulting capacity. We are targeting to become the company where the best consultants in Production Management for Metals worldwide want to be.
In general, I believe that the functional scope of our product PSImetals will remain like it is today. We are the only supplier in the metals business who provides the complete coverage of end-to-end processes for SCM, MES and Logistics in the market. This stable product scope over the last years allowed us to specialize our functionality very much according to the needs in our Metals niche market.
This is definitely a USP and we feel that our customers appreciate this very much!
Not really – there are two “buts” to my answer above. The first “but” is concerning our platform and technology the product is based on. Although our clients in the metals market are in general more conservative with respect to IT technology there is an increasing demand for cloud based solutions, non-disruptive upgrades and flexible support of all kind of end user devices.
The second “but” is related to the change in the mindset of our customers in terms of digitalization. So far, the majority of projects running under the umbrella of digitalization are more on a level of pilots and local silo solutions. The more these technologies like Machine Learning and AI in general are becoming mature and proven in our metals business the more our clients are expecting these features as an integrated part of a standard platform like PSImetals. This request is currently the most dynamic area driving our product development strategy a lot.
We started last year to roll out our new so-called Service Platform fully based on the PSI Java Framework (PJF). The new technology will give many highlights and advantages to our clients. This includes a service-based architecture providing state-of-the-art business process and workflow-modeling based on the new PSIbus. Furthermore, we will become independent from Oracle supporting in the future all relevant database technologies. A special highlight of the platform is the so-called “WORA” (Write-Once-Run-Anywhere) technology that allows our customers to model screens just once and to deploy it to all kind of runtime environments, might be a Smartphone or a classic Desktop Workstation.
Regarding the second “but” - the new platform supports all common AI frameworks which now enable us to provide additional services e. g. for quality prediction and defect pattern recognition. Besides the pure technological aspect to integrate AI frameworks PSI meanwhile also established a group of business experts that is highly skilled in the application of AI in the different industry segments.
It is for sure nothing our customers have to wait for – it will be a smooth transition over a defined period of time. We already started last year to “peel out” functionality from our Production Planning components to become migrated to the new platform. This new Inquiry and Demand Management Service will be part of our next PSImetals 5.20 Release. These new services are always working in close coexistence with the remaining functionality of today’s platform. Thereby we allow our clients to follow stepwise our migration strategy without bigger disruptions and according to their targeted speed.
Digitalization plays a great role not only in the lives of our customers but also in ours. If we look at our current delivery and deploy process it is definitely an area that we can “digitalize” a lot to achieve more automation and efficiency. Therefore we are preparing ourselves for the new age of B2B internet and increasingly investing in an automated multi-cloud collaboration platform. Here, soon our customers will be able to buy and install PSImetals Virtual Factory with a click of a mouse!
I guess we are all impacted strongly by the current Corona crisis. But finally every crisis will also lead to a kind of selection process. The tighter money becomes the more our clients will focus on technologies and products that will bring a fast ROI. I believe that especially with our new Service Platform and our comprehensive business expertise in Metals we are very well prepared to address the right topics and to help our clients through this challenging period.
Our project delivery capability needs to improve to match the increased complexity and functionality of projects that we now regularly implement. On the basis of our successful product strategy we have sold ever more comprehensive solutions to our customers, often promising a global multi-site strategy to harmonize their systems across the full breadth of their MES and APS processes. In recent years we have frequently struggled to execute these large and complex projects profitably and to the customer’s satisfaction. This will require changes in project management organization, better tools to support project execution, and a good system of knowledge management.
We have great experts, good experience and extensive expertise, which I feel we need to manage better in our company. This is why we are going to work on more effectively applying our resources, supporting project teams throughout the project, and improving our knowledge management.
The goal is to become more consistent, more efficient and more secure in completing our projects.
As a first initiative, we are adding two mandatory steps into our project methodology. These will serve to support the project team and provide necessary guidance and validation of the project’s design. First will be in an Orientation session before the Fit/Gap Specification, where experts familiarize the project team with the latest features and considerations of the specific functionality. Following the Fit/Gap Specification we are adding an Architectural Design Workshop to ensure that the project team plans and follows an implementation design that addresses the full business process functionality required by the customer and provided by our product.
Our customers have very high expectations of our project delivery capability when they engage us. With these changes, I believe we will help project teams meet those expectations.
In addition to your new role as Director of the Strategy Committee, you have been President of PSI Metals North America Inc. since 2011. How has our business in North America changed over the years and what can we expect for the future?
When we founded the company in 2011, we started with 3 employees and rapidly hired 4 more. We had two active customers, and our name recognition in the North American market was limited to a few companies, mainly with European roots. Today we are at 21 employees, have 20 active projects with 11 customers, and are widely recognized as the market leader in our field. PSI Metals North America is still growing rapidly, with major new projects starting, and an extremely encouraging sales pipeline. We have relocated our office to be prepared for a doubling of our staff in the next few years, and are aggressively looking for good talent.
PSI was my first employer after graduate school, and I was thrilled to find a company that has such a strong commitment to its employees as individuals and as team members. Despite disagreements and arguments, or perhaps because of the openness of dealing with them, I have always had the feeling that we are all pulling together to get through problems, and relying on each other in the end. I found in my years away from PSI that this is a rare company culture that needs to be treasured.
The execution of complex projects has been the bread and butter of PSI since the beginning. As the challenge grows in a world of digitalization, interconnectivity, and new features enabled by artificial intelligence technologies, PSI continues to support and enhance its base of production management infrastructure software while growing in capability, configurability and functionality to provide the best solutions for our customers.
The last three years have been exciting for PSI Metals in general and, certainly for me. While continuing expanding our market position and our business, we have been continuously transforming the company.
Over the past few years, we have seen the company becoming mature in the delivery of stable and robust products. Elaborating on the PSI Java Framework, we have launched in 2019 our new PSImetals Service Platform, which allows our customer to benefits from modern technologies and new features within PSImetals while continuing to have access to solid functionalities, which have been historically grown into our software. This is not only a huge paradigm change for the company, but also the outcome of a tremendous amount of work.
We have a good position at the moment - we are a solid company, we have a good market presence, we are in different segments of the world and we have great expertise in the company. Despite this good market presence, we still have many uncovered areas. Jörg, Harald and I want to especially focus on the company’s further growth in the next years.
In order to go for this growth, we also like to transform the spirit of the company to become more entrepreneurial and to extend our business opportunities and added value we bring to our customers.
PSImetals being active worldwide, we will need to balance our developments in the different regions. The situation of the metals industry is different in several geographical areas: we need to focus on gaining new market share in some regions (such as Russia or Asia) while in other areas, where we are already benefiting from a comfortable market share, the company will further develop and enhance its consulting skills in order to bring more value to our customers, not only through our software, but also through our domain expertise in metals industry. Further, in some other areas, new products might be proving to be the best way to advance our customers in their digitalization strategy.
This will require an entrepreneurial spirit and an ability to adapt itself to the given environment. We are counting on our managers and employees to adhere to this spirit and seek the growth on their local markets.
What are your dreams?
We have many dreams! We are a global company with empowered people – that’s why we dream that in the future PSI Metals will become the place our employees want to call “home”. We want to become the best company to work for. We want our employees to be proud of being in a company that cares about sustainability, gender equality, company culture, etc. We dream that PSImetals, our product, will become an intelligent platform that uses the best technology for our customers and allows us to adapt to new production environments and so much more!
Our strategy is not going to change much with the new management - Jörg, Harald and I are just refining the strategy in more detail and bringing in more details about how we see our ability to achieve this. Also our vision stays the same: it is all about our people and products. We believe that by working with great people who want to be in the company and who use a great software product to serve the customer, we create a company we all call home, a company we enjoy being in and where our employees are proud to deliver values to our customers.
It’s my first love! When I started my career within PSI Metals back in 2001, I started as a Sales executive role which I have been doing for many years before having the chance to contribute to other aspects of the company.
I have appreciated, in the last years, participating to the growth of the company, specifically leading the product development area and supporting our strategy in this respect. But I am also excited to come back to my first love: establishing partnership and network with our customers in order to see how best we can serve them and help to better produce metals. If I can help our customers to improve the way they are working and make them more efficient, it would be my best reward for the success!
