A business park just outside of Hatfield in Hertfordshire is the home of manufacturing giant Henkel’s headquarters for UK and Ireland. The building seems in keeping with the British cliché of a Germany company: the office is modern and bright but slightly soulless.

Tall and precise, Eckehard Stech, head of IT for UK and Ireland, seems to conform to our hackneyed view of a German manager, his understated manner in keeping with the quiet hum of activity in the office.

But there is more to Stech than a cliché. He is not afraid to go outside of his comfort zone. After several years working in Germany, he asked management to give him an exciting job somewhere else. So they posted him to Moscow in 2003 as the company’s head of IT for Russia, the antithesis of his homeland.

Stech had to grapple with an enormous country and a chaotic marketplace. Communist rule may have collapsed more than a decade before he arrived, but the Soviet mindset was still alive and well, he says.

Henkel had companies in six different locations and wanted to bring the IT departments of its separate businesses into one unit. It was no easy task. “It was a big challenge to get those people to work as one team and to integrate them with the global IT organisation,” says Stech.

There was a huge cultural barrier to be bridged. At one workshop, Stech wanted his IT engineers to come to him with suggested solutions for their problems. It was a concept that did not go down well. One employee from a city 300km to the south of Moscow, bluntly told him that coming up with solutions and directives was the manager’s job. “New things are not really welcome in Russia,” he says.

But over time, Stech managed to persuade his staff that they had the competence and the skills to solve their own problems. And he saw his Russian employees blossom.

The employee who had criticised Stech’s management style is typical. When Stech started in his role, he barely spoke a word of English, but a year later his spoken English was fluent.

“There is a lot of potential in Russia,” says Stech. “You just need to provide the people with the opportunity to realise their true potential.”

Stech knew he had turned around the Russian operation when he compared notes with another western company about implementing an SAP system. “They said: ‘Once we fired half the workforce, it all seemed to work fine.’ We managed to get everything across to one platform without firing a single employee,” he says.

Henkel succeeded where other companies struggled because of its corporate culture, says Stech. “We talked to our staff and gave them job security. We gave the freedom to come to us with their ideas and solutions. The culture of the company is one of collaboration rather than a strict hierarchy,” he says.

With more than 50,000 employees worldwide, collaboration across Henkel’s operations in 150-plus countries is a significant business engineering challenge. Like other European chemical giants, such as ICI and Hoechst (now Aventis), Henkel has re-invented itself, hiving off its low-margin bulk industrial chemical business to focus on higher margin consumer and industrial brands.

One of Henkel’s key areas of expertise is adhesives. It makes and sells glue for a huge range of customers ­ from three-year-olds in kindergarten using Pritt sticks to make collages, to car makers using Teroson to fix metal parts.

The company also makes hair and personal care products, such as Schwarzkopf and Right Guard. Outside the UK and Ireland, it also manufactures household cleaning and laundry products, with Persil being one of its best-selling brands.

Branded consumer goods might offer a much higher margin than bulk industrial ingredients, but it is still a tricky market. And in a mature market, such as the UK, growing share and profitability is particularly hard work. To survive, t he company ­ including its IT system ­ needs to be as efficient as possible.

The challenges facing Stech in his role as IT director for UK and Ireland are very different from those that faced him in Russia. Here, his role is to introduce economies of scale by standardising and centralising the IT system.

The helpdesk is one example of how things have changed. Instead of a local service desk, there is now one centralised system in Nuremberg, Germany. The rationale for standardisation is that a unified system requires less support and maintenance. As the IT staff spend less time helping employees, they can instead help roll out the new system in other countries. And the more countries they transfer to the system, the more efficient they become at the task.

Henkel uses SAP to manage a range of tasks from purchasing to sales, including warehousing and production. The company wants its IT system to be as effective as possible, but there is a limit to just how much the system can be standardised.
Factories are run as efficiently as possible but the same product often has different packaging, sizes and branding styles for different geographic regions.

The breadth of Henkel’s product portfolio also makes life difficult. Even within one product category, the customer base is diverse: selling industrial glue to a car manufacturer is different from selling a Pritt stick to a child. For industrial customers, for example, the firm does more than just sell them the glue. “You also sell them a tool to put the glue onto the surface of the parts and the way to hold the two parts together to get the best bond,” Stech says.

All the different business requirements present a contradictory challenge for managing the supply chain: it has to be efficient but also flexible. The basic systems have to work all of the time.

A truck cannot leave the warehouse until the printer has spat out the customer order. At the other extreme, the systems have to try to ensure the delivery of many different items is done in the most cost-efficient way.

Despite the demands of the job, it is not any of the day-to-day pressures that frustrate Stech. It is the random acts, completely beyond his control, that make him cross.

Recently there was a power cut that meant the whole of the Hatfield office could do nothing for several hours. The crisis was solved within hours but Stech was frustrated with the situation.

“Maybe it’s a part of being German and efficient. We just don’t like it when things go wrong, even if it’s not our responsibility,” he says with a big grin.