Post by Rejhan Fazlic

In recent months, I had the opportunity to support quite a few firms in Switzerland’s’ mid-market. I’ve spent time with hidden champions, established players and new innovative challengers – and all of them face the same pressure on the market: strong CHF, softer demand, talent gaps, rising compliance, cyber risk, and energy volatility. In conversations with CIOs and CTOs I often sense the desire to understand how technology can contribute to create answers to those very challenging topics. Obviously, there’s no magic formula, but I wanted to share a couple thoughts around it and what can be done now: - Protect cash and margins (e.g. streamline finance, enforce pricing discipline, improve risk visibility) by strengthen ERP as the finance backbone; digitize AP/AR (e-invoicing, automated matching) and enforce master data quality (customers, items, price lists). - Strengthen operations (e.g. better planning, shopfloor transparency, and fewer outages) by introduce demand/inventory planning tools integrated with ERP; standardize S&OP cadence and data structures (BOMs, routings, lead times). - Modernize go-to-market (e.g. standardize pipeline, speed up quoting, localize consistently) by harmonizing the CRM foundation, implementing CPQ solutions and standardizing / centralizing product data (potentially via PIM). - Enable people securely pilots by investing in reasonable AI use cases, education / enabling people to use existing / new tools and apply them to their day-to-day job, while simultaneously gradually but steadily enforcing securing elements like MFA / single sign on, proper device management and more. As you can see, I truly believe that your Technology Leaders have and will continue to have a vital role, when it comes to actively supporting the firm’s success, especially when we face challenging times. Which priorities do you see and what are you doing to tackle the current market environment? Norbert Kuehnis Reto Brunner Sascha Wischek Reto Blaser Reto Seibold Claudio Prante Marco Tremonte Oliver Kuntze Paul Sailer David Roman Thomas Ebinger Thomas Wallmer Urs Brügger Jeremy Wikler Peter Keppler Gabriele D'Achille Joscha Milinski Claudius Meyer Albert Faessler Matthias Leybold Prafull Sharma Dr. Sebastian Vogt Peter Blank Matteo Biondi, PhD Martegn Arpagaus Driton Thaqi Deidra L. Inan Dogan Amit Singh Markus Steinbrecher Ralf Thiele Ralf Hofstetter Urs P. Küderli Roman Leimer #pwc #pwcproud #midmarket #middlemarket #technology #innovation #transformation