What’s enabled Fresenius to transform IT

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.

Transformation never ends

This isn’t the end of the IT transformation journey for Elfering, of course. It’s also a matter of explaining what added value IT can generate to the business on a continuous basis. So it’s incumbent on Elfering and his team to be vigilant and constantly monitor new IT trends. “Transformation never ends,” he says, adding that Fresenius has created a solid roadmap for this. With the new IT structure, it’s possible, for example, to quickly develop new tools and functions related to generative AI, and then use them effectively.

Even though the project was challenging, and continues to be a challenge — with some contracts negotiated and signed essentially on Christmas — Elfering is content how things have progressed, expressing he’d do it the same way if given the opportunity to start over.

With the transformation in one big step, IT at Elfering is also more flexible and transparent. The technological benefits might have been made evident quicker on their own, however, but this isn’t just a technical project. “IT transformation is a people job,” he says. Change management and communication therefore played an indispensable role in its success.

Elfering, who won the CIO of the Year Award in 2023 for his project, certainly advocates an ambitious approach to digital transformation, despite how unexpected things came up in the course of the project. But solutions were always at hand with the right encouragement and direction among team leaders and colleagues. And one should also be wary of those who want to pump the brakes in the face of rapid transformation. “If you listen to it, you won’t get anywhere,” he says. “It’s better to do a lot and just get on with it.”