More standards for better service

Mr. Eichhorst, you joined KWS six months ago. How has your start been? Have you been able to gain an impression of what agriculture is all about?

The past six months went by extremely fast. They were packed with meetings, introductions, and assessments. But they were also full of learning for me. I was able to talk to my whole team in finance and procurement, despite the continuing challenges with Corona. And I was able to have a good “walk” around the whole company. I had a chance to look into breeding, saw our sugar beet production and received some close insights into our research & development work. This also took me a bit back in my own history.

To what extent?

I noticed a number of earlier touchpoints with agriculture that I had long forgotten. When I was a high school student in East Germany, we had to do so-called polytechnical work. For example. I had to go into the sugar beet fields for weeding. That was tough work. Anyway, now I have noticed that KWS has developed solutions that avoid weeding for sugar beet. What a pity that these weren’t available back then.

What’s your view of our corporate culture?

To me, starting at KWS in Berlin is an exciting experience. Getting to know KWS as a very traditional and structured company, and at the same time seeing many colleagues carry the Berlin start-up spirit into the company is great. So, all in all, I really learned a lot in these six months about the KWS world, our products and of course our internal processes.

We’re changing a lot of administrative processes and services throughout KWS with GLOBE. You were already a change driver and modernizer in the area of finance in your previous role. What experience do you bring with you for your new duties?

This is true. I have been involved in several major change initiatives during my career and these experiences may well have been a trigger to select me for this role here at KWS Berlin. In my former company Jenoptik, for example, I established a new finance service center and pushed for the professionalization and standardization of these services. This experience helps me to cope with the various challenges in the new role. I understand the demands from the business side in such situations but also know the many challenges that come with the establishment of a new service organization.

And one key lesson that I have learned from the past is, to have a proper communication plan in place. We need to take our colleagues and stakeholders along on our change journey. This is something that you easily forget, when you work hard on new developments.

Rolling out GLOBE involves a number of challenges. Employees still have to get used to the new way of working, and it will take time for the new processes to become fully established. What are the biggest tasks facing you at the moment?

In general, I am convinced that this is absolutely the right project for KWS to undertake, at this time, as it prepares our company for the future. However, in the finance area, we still have quite a journey ahead of us. If we look at our processes, for example, we currently still have a quite low level of standardization and automation. Many processes are very individual for each country or even entity for which we provide services, and therefore require a lot of manual labor to be executed.

A second major challenge is our technology. We still have a very heterogenous systems’ landscape, where applications and databases are not fully compatible across companies and teams. We need to better integrate and harmonize these systems to ensure the best possible data quality and the best use of our finance expert knowledge. But I’m confident that we can improve in these areas over the next months and years.

In all our GLOBE teams I find very committed colleagues and I’m extremely happy to have so many great finance experts at my side. At the moment, they are caught in a lot of manual processes and workarounds. But improving our technology and process base will enable us to also use their expertise in the best way possible.