Initiatives with €65M savings potential brought into implementation within 3 months — ChangeMaker at a German basic-materials group

The company was under heavy pressure from high energy costs, low-priced Chinese exports, declining demand from the automotive sector, and utilization-driven manufacturing problems. Management, the PMO, and the supporting international consulting firm agreed: the initiative program could not be steered fast enough with in-house means — every week of delay would have meant more than EUR 1 million in run-rate losses. On top of that, damages of nearly EUR 10 million from the avoidable failure of initiatives would have been expected.

Direct SSO and Active Directory integration gave all participants easy access. Thanks to the ChangeMaker template and no-code customizing, the team workspace was ready to use within 2 days. Over the following days, 100 initiative owners were trained for productive work in ChangeMaker in 12 one-hour sessions. In parallel, the reporting was tailored to the precise information needs of each reporting level, and management access was made easy via browser bookmarks. The facilitators of the idea-generation workshops captured initiative ideas directly in the ChangeMaker scratchpad and handed them over to the initiative teams for further development. The team workspace bundled the working surface, guidance, communication, and automated reporting. As a result, nearly all teams had a single point of contact and could do without fragmented standalone tools such as Excel and PowerPoint. Eight selected initiative teams reported each Friday afternoon to the central steering committee — but given the time pressure, management and the PMO also made more intensive use of the option to inform themselves about the project status independently at any time.