In the picturesque East Tirol, in a town with just barely five thousand residents, sits one of the fastest-growing hidden champions in Austria, specializing in heat pumps – iDM Energiesysteme Gmbh. We visited them recently to see what exactly led to this rapid expansion, as well as, of course, to help them continue this growth by making their processes leaner and meaner.
With locations in Matrei in East Tirol, Spittal in Upper Carinthia, Barbian in Italy, and Leuteshausen in Germany, iDM’s workforce consists of just north of one thousand employees, with 2023 seeing their yearly revenue break the €200 million milestone for the first time. Although iDM has been on the market for nearly 45 years, most of this growth was realised in just the last couple of years, largely thanks to their shrewd, forward-looking strategy in response to the energy crisis. The result speaks for itself – it was only 5 years earlier, in 2018, that their yearly revenues were at just €45 million.[1]
Such rapid expansion does not come without its challenges, however. The skyrocketing demand of the last couple years and the resulting bottlenecks in production capacity could only be overcome with heavy investments in additional production facilities. This can cause follow-on challenges as well, as processes and organizational structures growing at this speed can become more complex uncoordinated, which can lead to higher costs of production.[2]
In order to rapidly and easily create transparency over these risks, IDM decided to perform a Process Mining Proof of Concept with us and have a look at their Order to Cash value chain. The goal: create a quick baseline for understanding how Process Mining functions and how it can support them in their business goals, with minimal effort from the internal staff. In the process of the POC, we performed the following steps together:
The findings spoke for themselves. It was immediately visible in high resolution how long each individual step in the process took, what the structure of the processes at large was, how manual data entry affects the runtime of the processes, how a preliminary credit check affected payment, and how high the discrepancy was between the requested delivery date and the actual delivery date was on average.
In a very productive closing workshop, we were able to talk about the implications of our findings with the relevant team at iDM for an entire day. Using methdologies derived from Design Thinking, we helped our colleagues at iDM prioritise which parts of the process could be addressed with the lowest relative effort and the highest return. Among other things, we discussed the implementation of digital forms for reducing errors from manual data input and transfer, bridging system APIs with workflow management, and the use of AI copilots to optimize communication and data input in sales.
We loved every minute of our visit to iDM’s beautiful, modern headquarters, and are glad to have been able to contribute to their digital transformation and process management. We look forward to seeing what the future will bring and are excited at the prospect of continuing to work together in the future for a brighter, more efficient, and more innovative tomorrow.