Holger Studtmund sees digitization very pragmatically: “If you want German craftsmanship at affordable prices, there is no other way.” He knows what he’s talking about: The Taifun company for craft software has been around for 34 years, and he sits on the board of directors. Software has not been a foreign concept in this area for many years.
But times have changed. Many of the programs and solutions on the market are old, they only run on Windows. But that is no longer enough. What is needed is software that works on any end device, that transfers dimensions immediately into the computer drawing program (CAD), where a customer can sign on a tablet as if he were receiving a package. Studtmund, has therefore done something unusual with his colleagues: He joined his company Taifun under a new roof together with four manufacturers of software for other trades – under the leadership of an investor.
Many investors, he says, have already asked him. But nobody was as convincing as the Karlsruhe investor LEA Partners, who set up a 200 million euro fund exclusively for the digitization of medium-sized companies. Studtmund is sure that even a relatively large company like Taifun, well established and with many existing customers, could benefit from joining a platform. Because in order to prepare for the new circumstances, you need completely different virtues and skills than those previously required.
Global companies did not emerge, the target group is too small for that
So far, experts, many of them in their own field, have programmed software for their colleagues outside, which, with perhaps a few updates, would serve its purpose for years or decades. Global companies did not emerge from this, the target group is too small for that, but well-established companies that understand what their customers need. But digitization has changed the requirements drastically. Implementing the programs now in a changed world, many of the small software houses would not be able to do that on their own. Studtmund envisions agile software development that proceeds in small steps, works transparently and constantly checks and evaluates whether the intended goals are actually being achieved.
Such methods are needed to meet the new requirements, as Michael Hartmann says. Hartmann is the head of the association, which includes Taifun, M-Soft, Pinncalc, Bauoffice and Engel Dataconcept – all software that is successful in its niche. But what exactly can be imagined under these requirements and, above all, what is the point of the heating engineer or carpenter using them? “The focus is more and more on the mobile connection of fitters,” says Hartmann. They could, for example, enter all the necessary information into a tablet and while they are still on the way back from the customer, the invoice can be completed in the company office.
“You can save series of measurements over the years,” Hartmann gives another example. The data of an offer could be immediately transferred to a computer drawing program and displayed in a photo-realistic manner. “You can use the planning to create an offer and then send the order to the machine,” enthuses the software man who was previously responsible for digitization projects at Microsoft and Lexware. “This is the only way to make prices that are acceptable.”
Many craft businesses are still miles away from that. They work with pen and paper; more than 80 percent still order the material from their wholesaler by phone. But a new generation is also growing up that doesn’t just want to use software. It also has to be able to keep up with what the younger ones use in their lives: smartphones and tablets.
So that the software can also be used by the customer, it must run in the cloud. That alone requires an infrastructure that smaller software manufacturers usually do not have. But writing software in such a way that it can be used on all possible end devices is not one of their core competencies. “The smaller ones in particular benefit from the merger,” says Michael Hartmann. Together you can also address a larger market. However, the software also has to be purified when it is ported to the cloud. “We will have to get rid of a lot,” says Hartmann. Often it is about special requests from individual customers that are of no use to others.