Digital transformation consulting for the Mittelstand in Germany

Where digital work stops in a Mittelstand firm

It stops between the systems. An order arrives by email, someone types it into a spreadsheet, and a colleague copies it into the ERP. A customer sends a scanned form, and it waits in a shared mailbox until somebody has time. Each copy costs time and adds typos, and nobody sees the status of a case without asking around.

The firms themselves give their digitalization a middling mark. In the DIHK’s digitalization survey of nearly 5,000 companies, published on January 28, 2026, they rated it at an average of 2.8 on the German school scale, where 1 is the best mark (DIHK, January 2026).

What I build for it

I replace the copy steps with one web application that holds the data once. Customers or staff enter it in a form, the application checks it, and the systems behind it receive it through an interface. The application shows the status of each case to the people who need it, and roles decide who may see and change what.

In my projects, digitalization has a start and an end: one process moves into one application on a switch date. The next process follows once the first one runs.

Which process to digitize first

Score each candidate process from 0 to 2 on the six questions below before our call. The process with the highest sum is the first project. Personal data raises the score because spreadsheets and mail folders make it hard to protect under the GDPR.

Question	0 points	1 point	2 points
How often does the process run?	Monthly or less	Weekly	Daily
How many people touch one case?	One	Two	Three or more
Where is the same data typed twice?	Nowhere	In one step	In several steps
Do customers or suppliers wait on it?	No	Sometimes	For each case
How do you learn the status of a case?	From one system	By asking one person	By asking around
Which personal data does it hold?	None	Staff data	Customer data

A process that scores high on the first four rows and low on the last one makes a good first project: it saves work soon and carries little legal risk while your team gets used to the application.

Cases from my work

• At Policen Direkt, a company in the German secondary market for life insurance, I built a digital insurance manager with colleagues. Thousands of customers upload and manage their policies in it and order products of external partners (customer count from 2016 to 2021). I programmed the front end in Angular and connected the portal to the existing CRM.
• A portal with personal logins through which a financial services group provides its documents on the Money Laundering Act to companies.
• A system that rates warehouse locations. When the formulas change, it updates the results and shows them as statistics.
• A date-based reminder service that emails hundreds of thousands of customers about holidays and recurring events (customer count from 2011 to 2016).

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke. I have worked in IT and media for more than twenty years, and at an e-commerce company of Burda Digital I was the IT link between management and marketing. At the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital I was Chief Information Officer, with the IT budget and the disciplinary lead of business-critical teams. Today I use Claude and Codex daily and teach at Claude Hacker House. I am also interested in open-source AI models that a firm runs on its own servers. Details: Background.