Customer Reference Story
Drivers of modernization: Paletten-Service Hamburg relies on easy solutions
About Paletten-Service Hamburg
“My tip to other companies is: take your time beforehand and put a lot of energy into drawing up a specification sheet in which the status quo is well documented and the expectations of the project are clearly formulated. This not only helps to find the right partner, but also in the implementation phase.”
Daniel Stadach, COO Paletten-Service Hamburg AG
How can digitalization be successfully implemented in the departments? Many companies struggle with this question. In this Hamburg-based family business, the head of operations took on the task himself and showed how it can be done with perseverance, clear objectives, dedicated software selection, good documentation and employee support.
One of the leading pallet suppliers in Germany
„Nordically uncomplicated, hanseatically correkt“, is the motto with which Paletten-Service Hamburg welcomes its customers on the company website. The adjectives uncomplicated and correct also fit the product that the company has been focusing on for more than 50 years:
The pallet – a highly standardized mass-produced article that performs its service worldwide day after day as a perfectly standardized carrier for goods of all kinds. The pallet business has little to do with hipness, but requires the classic skills of good business people, such as keeping costs under control, calculating cleverly and showing customer proximity.
Over the years, the Hanseatic family business has built up a business model around its core product with the PSH Group, which serves the entire value chain of a pallet:
In addition to the manufacture, trade and repair of pallets, this also includes a pooling system that allows its customers to rent pallets for a limited period of time. The company delivers 10 million pallets per year. A shipping division, warehouse logistics with 80,000 square meters of space and a store for protective workwear round off the Hanseatic company’s portfolio. With its 250 employees and eight locations in Germany and Poland, the company generates almost 100 million euros a year.
Drivers of modernization
Daniel Stadach has been working for Paletten-Service Hamburg for 14 years. Since 2019, he has been responsible for the operational business of the entire group as COO. In his role as Managing Director, Stadach has brought a breath of fresh air to the company.
He pushed sustainability to the top of the company’s agenda: PSH pallets are made from sustainable wood sourced from Lower Saxony and come with sustainability certificates. The ambitious goal is to offer competitively priced pallets that can be used and traded with a clear conscience.
A second strategic focus for Daniel Stadach is the topic of digitalization. Stadach does not see digitalization as an end in itself, but as an indispensable means of “changing and improving processes”.
He has found that there is also resistance to overcome in a company at the beginning of such a transformation process, because many employees are skeptical when it comes to doing things differently:
“But as Managing Director, I have to keep an eye on the long-term perspective and tackle changes that are crucial to success.”
Pain point: invoice management
After being appointed Chief Operation Officer in 2019, Stadach identified invoice processing as one of the most pressing pain points:
“I had the feeling that the most important job I have in this company is to put squiggles under invoices.”
The result: around 60 working hours per week are spent processing incoming invoices at the company headquarters, which has just 40 employees. There were 46 process steps between invoice receipt and filing of the paid invoice, involving seven different people.
“Sometimes there were three or four versions of the same invoice that were filed in different folders. And for a long time we wondered why we had to buy stacks of paper and rent new rooms for archiving.”
This inventory had a sobering effect and showed Daniel Stadach that a change was needed. The target was to reduce incoming invoice processing from 46 to 10 process steps.
The path leads to easy
The second step on the way to digitizing invoice processing was to find a suitable partner and an efficient software solution for the project. In addition to incoming invoice processing, outgoing invoices were also to be taken into account. Stadach had already largely digitized the latter process beforehand. Paletten-Service Hamburg uses the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central software as its ERP system. The solution for optimizing invoice workflows should also help to minimize paper output through digital filing.
Stadach’s first stop in his search for a digitization partner was an IT system house, but the COO was surprised to find that they had no solution to his problem. So he looked for other providers. At the end of the search, easy software prevailed over two competitors who had also made it onto the shortlist:
Although easy was not the cheapest provider on paper, in the end we opted for easy, not least because of the brand reputation and the size of the company.
The seamless integration of the easy Dynamics 365 BC interface into the Business Central Client of the ERP system was also impressive. This means that the easy interface always provides a complete view of all processes, customers and vendors, documents being posted and articles. Archiving and searching for, printing or sending documents is now possible with just a few mouse clicks using the easy Factbox in Microsoft ERP.
better together
For the collaboration with easy, Daniel Stadach formed a small team at the start of the 2020 project, which included two employees from the accounting department in addition to himself, who “are constantly dealing with invoices and are therefore involved in the process”. In hindsight, he is glad he made this decision:
“Change processes are the worst anyway and nobody likes them. I learned in the project that you have to do it together, otherwise you won’t get it done.”
Together with his team and with the support of easy, Stadach digitized invoice processing at Paletten-Service Hamburg and its subsidiaries. He proceeded step by step:
Starting with a small department at the company headquarters, the easy solution was rolled out to all subsidiaries over the next few years. easy provided Stadach and his team with technical support and training. Jours fixes were organized as an exchange format in which all technical questions were discussed together.
The beer bet
Daniel Stadach does not hide the fact that there was also resistance to overcome: at the beginning, most of the clerks were very reluctant to accept the transformation process he had initiated. Stadach recounts this with a smile and adds a little anecdote:
“I put an appointment in an accountant’s calendar that was a few months away.”
It was the deadline for redeeming a bet: “I bet that on this day in the future she will praise her manager for introducing the easy software in the company. The bet was a six-pack of beer. On the day in question, I was actually given the beer, with a note saying: “I’m sorry, but you were right.”
The fruits of digitization: easy archive makes everything easier
The success of this digitization measure can now also be assessed in figures:
The number of people who come into contact with an incoming invoice has fallen from seven to four. The process steps have been reduced from 46 to around 10 to 11. This is because many process steps, such as the allocation of creditors, now run automatically. Stadach feels it is important to point out that something else has changed beyond these figures. It concerns the topic of liquidity planning.
“We had an incredible lack of transparency when it came to incoming invoices and sometimes didn’t even know which invoices were already in the company. And then it happened that we had to provide 250,000 euros very quickly, for example, to settle an invoice for which the payment deadline had been reached, even though it was still stuck somewhere in the process. Now we know immediately when an invoice comes in and can plan the payment processes much more transparently.”
Finally, we wanted to know from Mr. Stadach what surprised him most positively in his daily work with the easy software. He doesn’t have to think about it for long: it’s the archive:
“Nobody notices this, but it is so valuable because it simplifies data management so incredibly thanks to automatic storage. It is audit-proof and ensures that every time an employee sends out an invoice or quotation, the document is stored securely, traceably and cannot be changed.”
My tip to other companies is: take your time beforehand and put a lot of energy into drawing up a specification sheet in which the status quo is well documented and the expectations of the project are clearly formulated. This not only helps to find the right partner, but also in the implementation phase.
Daniel Stadach,
COO Paletten-Service Hamburg AG