Category: Corporate & Business Development

What should your company look like in the future and how do you ensure its competitiveness? With active corporate development, you systematically address these questions about the future.

Digitalization and artificial intelligence are offering SMEs more and more opportunities to automate processes and workflows. Automation is a key element in organizing companies efficiently and thus making them fit for the future.

Through automation, tasks are transferred from employees to machines or systems. These carry out automated processes to achieve the task objectives without employees having to intervene.

The advantages of automation are obvious: significant efficiency gains, largely error-free operation, adherence to regulatory compliance and scalability are adequate responses to the ever-increasing competitive pressure and the shortage of skilled workers. The implementation of automation steps in medium-sized companies takes place in administration, manufacturing and production as well as in logistics, as there are many opportunities here to achieve the desired objectives.

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Whether you are an entrepreneur or not – the topic of pension provision affects us all. What happens if we are unable to act ourselves – if we are unable to work due to a sudden illness or an accident forces us to stay in hospital for a longer period of time and we are unresponsive?

Family members or parents may not automatically make full and permanent decisions or act on behalf of adults in a precautionary or emergency situation. The same applies to spouses and registered partners.

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Introducing digital technology into your own company is anything but trivial and poses a challenge for many companies. The introduction of an ERP system, i.e. a software solution for enterprise resource planning, requires a lot of preparatory work before the actual digitalisation of processes and workflows can begin.

But first: why an ERP system? An ERP system bundles real-time data from all departments in one system and thus provides a comprehensive overview. This makes it much easier to plan, control and monitor relevant business processes in a focussed manner. Trends and patterns in these processes and among stakeholders are recognised and potential problems are visualised at an early stage. This up-to-the-minute transparency across all areas of the company enables company managers to make the right decisions at the right time on the basis of solid data.

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Since 2024 at the latest, the topic of sustainability has been at the top of the agenda for many companies. The Corporate Social Responsibility Directive (CSRD) takes sustainability reporting to the next level and brings a significant expansion for companies. Since January 1, 2024, companies that are already subject to the Non-Financial Reporting Directive are required to report. In the next stage, CSRD will also apply to large corporations, and subsequently also to small and medium-sized enterprises with a capital market orientation.

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Transparency is one of the key factors in successfully managing a company. This applies equally to economically good and economically challenging times. The only difference is that a lack of transparency in economically challenging situations makes corporate management significantly more difficult and its absence can have far-reaching consequences. When company management acts on the basis of facts and figures, it creates a foundation for a future-proof organization. Ultimately, management based on facts and figures is an elementary component of good corporate governance.

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According to a recent study by KfW Research, around 560,000 companies will be facing management and ownership succession by the end of 2026. However, a third of these companies are planning to leave the market without a successor. And this high figure is not surprising. Succession has become a major challenge in many medium-sized companies.

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incontext.technology GmbH from Heidelberg and THE MAK’ED TEAM GmbH & Co. KG, with locations in Nuremberg and Karlsruhe, have agreed to cooperate. With this step, both companies are extending their value chain in all relevant questions of digitalisation and digital transformation in medium-sized companies. The synergy of management and process consulting on the side of THE MAK’ED TEAM and innovative technology on the side of INCTEC, as incontext.technology is called, leads to tailor-made concepts for the requirements of our two client companies. These can be realised with future-proof technology in almost all functional areas of medium-sized companies.

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An essential backbone of manufacturing SMEs are production employees who are proficient in the applications and have the relevant experience. These employees are crucial for the innovation and competitiveness of the company. In order to keep pace with the many changes and transformation processes in the competitive environment and to fully exploit the innovative capacity of the company, it is important to promote and permanently develop the competences of the employees in production. This can be implemented in a focused manner with strategic competence management. Read more

Companies that exploit the full potential of digitalisation can increase their efficiency and optimise their processes. So far – so good! But: Where is digitalisation potential in the company? When we work with SMEs on their digital transformation, the first step is to analyse the processes. This usually gives us specific process patterns: Are there processes that have a media break? For example, is an automated process interrupted because manual intervention is necessary? Are there particularly complicated processes that need a lot of accompanying attention or that have not yet been digitalised because of their complexity? Are there processes in the company that take a particularly long time to process? Are there processes in which errors frequently occur and which therefore require repeated interventions? Or are there processes that cause high process costs?

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A frequent experience in our customer projects is that our medium-sized customers react to the topic of compliance with the critical question: “And who is going to do that? Of course, a medium-sized company does not have the same resources as a group of companies, where a compliance department with several members deals with the topic. Nevertheless, the same legal framework conditions apply to SMEs and group companies.

Multiple crises, international interdependencies, challenging political developments. The risks for companies tend to increase.  The business world is increasingly difficult to assess, more dynamic and more complex. Compliance has become an important basis for SMEs to safeguard the company, protect it from potential risks and thus create a foundation for the long-term success of the company. Good compliance can protect the company in the best possible way and indicate emerging crises and problems at an early stage. For effective implementation of compliance management, it is particularly important in medium-sized companies to use resources wisely and to sensitise everyone in the company to the issue. All too often, compliance is still perceived as a secondary task and the risks that actually exist are massively underestimated.

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