Digital Enabler: the interview with Michael Jungmann

Michael Jungmann is an executive partner at Digital Enabler based in Austria. Digital Enabler is a digital transformation specialist in the industrial domain. With their clients, they develop business models and technical systems for new digital products and digital services. In addition, they also facilitate organisational change for their clients.

Why did you look for a technological partner and what made you choose Spyrosoft?

Being a specialist in the area of digital transformation, our projects are of strategic nature to our customers, they are typically complex and demand very high quality. All the needs of our clients and projects are very diverse when it comes to technologies, and usually, require a rapid start and a sustainable environment to maintain the product over long time.

We decided to go with a strategic partner so that we could establish an ecosystem for implementing and maintaining different projects over time. We’ve known the CEO of Spyrosoft for a long time and have been your customer since 2016. At that time, we were delighted with the technical expertise at Spyrosoft – and moreover, it’s very important that we share the same values as we truly want to provide the best solutions for our customers. With Spyrosoft, we’ve been able to establish mutual trust down to each person that works on our projects, which is very important to us.

Let’s go back once again to the beginning of the collaboration. Were there any surprising moments or any differences you spotted right away?

We’ve learned along the way that trust is the truly most important thing to turn a collaboration into the strategic partnership we were looking for. The client needs to trust the provider, but it has to be mutual too. It would never work if the provider had no reason to trust the client. We see it as our duty to justify that trust from our end – this is essential for the whole thing to work. It was maybe not surprising, but for us, it was a very valuable insight.

There was also this mature thing we could sense from Spyrosoft: the desire to understand our problems and not to simply propose an isolated solution. Working with someone that provides a solution may be natural, but with Spyrosoft, we were delighted to see that the story always starts with: ‘What is the problem that you want to solve?’. This shows a deeper level of understanding of how things work, and actually, this approach is not so common.

How has our collaboration changed in these 5 years since it’s started?

Our partnership started with a single project and it evolved, so now we have a portfolio of projects together. It emerged into a real ecosystem where we not only work on a project, but we’ve extended it to involve people, i.e. project managers and developers who we’ve worked with for years, and also the marketing organisation we work with – this is not so common for the clients. So, our collaboration has really transformed into the very thing we envisioned it to be at the beginning as an opportunity.

What would you say were and are the crucial factors that made and still make this collaboration successful?

To me, a project is always about problem solving – projects would not exist without problems. I’ve mentioned trust and ambition to solve problems before – they are key factors in our partnership with Spyrosoft. What I also see is the strong technical expertise of Spyrosoft.

In addition, there’s also the flexibility at scale that your company provides, because sometimes we have a technical request that needs to be completed within a certain timeframe.

We appreciate the openness in our partnership – in the end, it’s not about receiving only good news.  We care about the success of the project. In our collaboration I really appreciate that whenever there is an issue or a technical challenge we discuss it openly. I’m always happy to hear about problems because then I know that we are aware of them rather than hitting a wall later.

I also appreciate the fact that I’ve worked with most of the people at Spyrosoft for years already, so there’s that continuity we aim for.

How has Digital Enabler changed as a company thanks to this collaboration?

I believe our strategic direction is rather unique and we are glad that with Spyrosoft we have found a partner to explore it, keep what works well and change what can be improved.

We are also very pleased to see that Spyrosoft has new entities such as Unravel [our product design and UX studio] or the AI competence centre that we are in contact with. It’s not only interesting from a technical perspective but this way, we also have a different way of operating at the commercial level. A project with a defined functional scope requires a different approach than a more explorative AI project. We are truly glad that we can embrace those more recent trends in our cooperation.

What are the business results of our collaboration?

For all the projects that we worked on together, 100% were completed on time and on budget. I strongly believe that’s it’s an art to complete projects on time and on budget. Your time estimates are also always correct, and the quality of your work is impeccable. We would definitely refer Spyrosoft to other companies, and we already have.