A helping hand on the way to Industry 4.0

IHK Magazin Issue November 2017

Two co-founders support the digitalization.

An invoice is stamped and reaches the desk of the responsible employee via internal mail. He then examines it and sends it to accounting. “Usually, this is still the system in many small and medium-sized companies,” Sven Vogel (49) from Kempen says. Together with his business partner Jens Kokon (47) he wants to help companies to seize the chance to participate in the highly vaunted Industry 4.0. “We see ourselves as partners who take a company’s hand,” the two IT specialists explain, who founded their company develogment GmbH & Co. KG in March. “There are some experts who predict: Any company which has not digitalized all business processes efficiently by 2020 will no longer be able to exist in its current state,” Vogel says.

The new company with ten employees in the Technologie- und Gründerzentrum Niederrhein (TZN) at Industriering Ost in Kempen is not a startup in the usual sense. “Since we come from a large corporation, we have good relationships to other partners, such as large IT service providers, who can help us with technical and specialist expertise within every sector of the industry,” Vogel says. Usually, startups do not have that.

Vogel and his business partner met in 2002 while working for the international Lehnkering Group (now Imperial Chemical Logistics). Kokon, a computer scientist, spent 21 years developing software for various industries and initially worked as a consultant for the Duisburg branch, later as an internal developer, and most recently as head of the department. Vogel, who studied economics and was self-employed in software development during university, has been responsible for IT at Lehnkering and other departments of the Imperial group for many years. Together, the duo carried out several major projects. Their experiences from that time now form the basis of develogment’s three business areas, which primarily aim at logistics customers. Hence, the log in the company’s name.

„Logistics is too specific for handling everything with standard software systems“, Vogel explains. The Projects and Consultancy business area includes services such as workshop offers and classic consultancy. Logistics Solutions helps logistics companies to choose and implement software – whether with a third-party product or with crossdoxx, the company’s own product marketed since August. „This is our first step towards the digitalization of paper-based processes“, Vogel says. Examples are paper invoices or shipping documents. crosslinxx, which is currently developed, for instance, will automatically report any missing important shipping documents. The big picture is found in the third division Managed Analytics. As Vogel states, „There is so much data from vehicles, traffic news, social media, weather forecasts, GPS tracking – but many people do not know what to do with these information. Our goal is to make this data accessible to our customers.” CK