SAP Diamond Initiative: six awards for valantic

What’s the secret to success? 5 questions for… Kai Kronauer, Director SAP Engagement at valantic

The SAP Diamond Initiative awards are presented for excellence and outstanding services. Kai Kronauer explains valantic’s secret to success and what these awards mean to him.

With its Diamond Initiative, SAP Deutschland recognizes its partners’ exceptional services and outstanding industry expertise. This year, valantic received six coveted trophies: Partner of the Year 2021 in the DMI & Automotive sector, the special award for Line of Business Digital Supply Chain, and a nomination to the Partner Advisory Council, which works especially closely with SAP.

valantic was also recognized as a focus partner in the discrete manufacturing (DMI), process industry / life science (PLI) & service provider / media sectors.

SAP Deutschland’s evaluation matrix shows: In the diamond dimensions “innovations” and “expertise,” valantic is way ahead of the competitors’ average. Our editorial team spoke with Kai Kronauer, Director SAP Engagement at valantic. Kronauer and his team are largely responsible for this success.

Kai, congratulations on receiving the six awards from SAP. How do you become Partner of the Year in the DMI & Automotive sector?

Kronauer: Thank you very much, we’re very pleased about this award.

This award is recognition of our services, which span the disciplines innovations, expertise, demand generation, and sales generated due to partner support. There are many reasons for our success. We maintain close personal contact with all partners in management, sales, and partner and product management. A functioning network, transparency, and trust are the bases for working as partners and achieving success together.

The award is also the result of a clearly defined SAP strategy that we have formulated at valantic and pursue consistently. Examples are the definition of focus sectors such as DMI & automotive and go-to-market with industry-specific, solution-spanning end-to-end demo cases. Taking completely integrated end-to-end processes consisting of up to six SAP solutions from practice and delivering them virtually to the office or home; this was a true highlight of 2020 and one that we will continue.

Why was valantic presented with the special award in the LoB Digital Supply Chain?

I am especially pleased about our success story in the LOB Digital Supply Chain. It demonstrates the valantic spirit in cooperation with our customers and SAP.

In a very short time, with a lot of elbow grease, commitment, and a push from SAP, we succeeded in setting up a high-performance SAP Supply Chain team. Of course with each additional customer reference, SAP’s trust in us also increased. Today, SAP and valantic work very closely together; our personal network is tight and we cooperate with a great deal of enthusiasm.

Added to this is the fact that we at valantic always examine how we can use new impulses to give our partnership with SAP more oomph. Example of demand generation: The wine tasting events already mentioned, complete with a fully integrated end-to-end demo, quickly became indispensable. So we had to think of something new for 2021. What we thought of is our industry-specific use cases. initially with digital supply chain as our pilot project. 

The use cases describe pre-defined, individually scalable demo scenarios with different focal points. Our SAP colleagues and our customers thus have something they can hold onto – with easy visualization and that’s easy to understand.

What, in your opinion, are valantic’s particular strengths?

Our claim “end-to-end in the age of the customer” describes what we stand for in just one sentence: comprehensively digitalized, integrated company processes, thinking about our customers from the customer’s point of view. It is more important than ever today to increase entrepreneurial resilience and at the same time, to make customers loyal with a great, emotional experience. This is how we help our customers with everything on their path to transformation – from strategy to implementation to operation. We at valantic do all of this as a team.

Here’s a specific example: each of our customers has, in addition to the product team, a personal contact on the management or partner level. The concentrated power, being inspired by what we do, and acting as equal partners – valantic’s customers can feel the difference.

What’s behind the nomination to the Partner Advisory Council? What tasks, opportunities, and duties are associated with this?

Nomination as member of the Partner Advisory Council is another award for selected partners with  above-average performance. Together with the SAP management, as a partner we have the opportunity to directly incorporate our expertise and practical experience from cooperation with our customers and to help actively make essential decisions such as go-to-market and product strategies.

This is a special form of appreciation that we are especially pleased about, and which we take very seriously, also on behalf of our customers.

These six awards are both an honor and obligation for valantic. What do customers expect today of an excellent SAP partner?

Depending on the industry, our customers are facing many and large challenges. Some of the decisions they have to make will determine if they will stand or fall.

Therefore, it’s important to have a reliable partner, one who can reveal the individual levers that digitalization offers and help them with implementation. This is only possible with trust, a spirit of innovation, specialized and technological expertise, solid industry knowledge, and state-of-the-art software solutions.

For valantic, this means continuous improvement on all levels for a long-term, successful partnership. And the same applies for our partnership with SAP.

Thank you very much for the conversation, Kai.