From Service Provider to Business Partner: Vetropack's IT Transformation
How Vetropack transformed from a reactive IT service provider to a strategic business partner with data-driven transparency across finance, capacity, and demand management.
About Vetropack
The Vetropack Group is one of Europe's leading manufacturers of glass packaging for the food and beverage industry. With approximately 3,600 employees, the company operates modern production facilities as well as sales and distribution offices in Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Italy, Republic of Moldova, and Romania.
Throughout its over one-hundred-year history, the corporate group has successfully adapted to new market conditions, technological developments, and societal changes. Shaping change is part of Vetropack's identity, an attitude that also characterizes the company's current direction.
Growing Strategic Importance of IT
With increasing digitalization and the growing importance of Operational Technology (OT), it became clear that Information Technology (IT) plays a key role in the company's future viability. A significant change: the CIO no longer reports to the CFO, as is common in many companies, but directly to the CEO and is part of the extended executive management. This organizational change signals that IT at Vetropack is no longer viewed as merely a cost center or support function, but as a strategic success factor.
The Challenge
Despite glass packaging representing transparency and clarity, Vetropack's IT organization lacked transparency, structure, and clear strategic direction.
- IT lacked a common vision and clear mission statement
- Fragmented organization with isolated teams (Infrastructure, Enterprise Apps, Factory IT)
- No central governance or transparency over budgets, capacities, architectures, or licenses
- Business-driven decisions without IT input ("the business wants, the business gets")
- Uncoordinated system landscape with numerous isolated solutions
- IT perceived as reactive service provider rather than business partner
The Solution
A two-phase roadmap: achieve professional IT service provider maturity by 2027 ("Run IT like a Business"), then evolve into a business driver by 2030.
- Complete IT organization redesign based on Gartner IT Operating Model
- Bee360 Financial Management for complete cost transparency
- Capacity Management for resource planning and team protection
- Demand Management with IT Business Partners and Business Process Champions
- SAP integration as leading data source for procurement and invoicing
- "SaaS first" strategy eliminating Excel workarounds
Embrace Imperfection: Pragmatic Implementation
CIO Wolfram Schulze took a pragmatic approach to implementation: "We had to abandon the notion that perfection is the standard. What was more important was quickly moving from zero to a functioning standard, following the principle of 'Embrace Imperfection.'"
The timeline was clear from the beginning: Capacity and Financial Management should be fully established by the end of Q4, followed by Demand Management by the end of Q1 the following year. Despite the project's complexity, Vetropack stayed on schedule, with particularly positive progress in implementing the Finance and Capacity modules.
Change Management as Success Factor
A central element was comprehensive change management. Relevant stakeholders were identified from IT, HR, and business departments. This was followed by a broad information and training phase organized jointly with Bee360. Trainings were specifically staged by topics and target groups, while Bee360 supported with tool demos, documentation, and tailored use cases.
Measurable Results
Rapid maturity achievement and fundamental transformation of IT's role
Financial Management
Complete transparency achieved
Demand Management
Strategic prioritization established
Faster Than Average
Gartner maturity reached in 1 year vs 3-5 years typical
Target Milestone
Professional IT service provider ("Run IT like a Business")
Key Benefits Achieved
- • Data-based decision foundation instead of assumptions
- • Restored trust between IT and business based on facts
- • Structured budget optimization focusing on protecting core services
- • Pull-based self-service through standardized dashboards
- • Complete process integration preventing parallel data worlds
- • Rapid ROI - investment amortized within the first year
What the CIO Says
Direct insights from Vetropack's IT transformation leader
"Bee360 has significantly contributed to the IT evolving from a reactive service provider to a business partner that actively contributes to the company's governance and value creation. Today we see exactly where our capacities, finances, and demands stand, and can make decisions based on data rather than assumptions."
"Bee360 convinced us not through maximum depth in individual functional areas, but through breadth, consistency, and simple applicability. I wanted a tool that guides us, delivers quick results, and works without endless customizations. Rather 70 percent functionality that we actually use than 100 percent perfection that nobody applies in daily work."
"We had an Enterprise Architecture Management tool in the past that was almost as expensive as Bee360, but nobody made a single decision based on the data maintained in it. It was a data grave – technically perfect but practically ineffective. Bee360 is different: it's not a data repository but a central working environment that's indispensable in daily operations."
Partnership on Eye Level
"I never experienced typical sales practices coming from completely the wrong direction. From the very beginning, I experienced Bee360 as a partner on eye level who is authentic, has integrity, and is genuinely interested in our success. Bee360 is one of the partners in our portfolio with whom you can work unbureaucratically and meaningfully without a lot of fuss."
— Wolfram Schulze, CIO, Vetropack Group
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