With great pleasure I can look back with my team on two decades in the market for IT-related consulting and customer support. During that time, we have evolved, expanded our portfolio, mastered a global economic crisis and successfully implemented many projects with our customers.
It is my concern to give you an insight into our history and our self-image: individual – customer-oriented – innovative – reliable.
The beginnings
Founded at the end of December 1998 and launched operationally in January 1999 – these were the beginnings of BIK. As a spin-off of an information systems chair at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, practical research and high methodological competence were to be the basis for a customer-oriented and committed consulting company.
In the first few years, we focused on process management, from the documentation and optimization of individual processes to the development of entire process houses. At some point our customers asked us not to leave them alone after optimizing their processes, but also to take the next steps with them. So we supported the introduction of software solutions, most of which followed our process activities.
The technology jolt
As is so often the case, at some point a coincidence gained particular importance: Microsoft launched SharePoint, a platform that was intended to support collaboration and workflow requirements. We entered and formed another business area – significantly closer to IT than our previous activities. Until today, process management and creative, innovative and powerful SharePoint solutions are focal points of BIK. We ourselves were one of the "early adaptors" of cloud technology – at a time when the uncertainty of this innovation was still being concealed with security concerns, we had already restructured our entire infrastructure accordingly and therefore naturally pursued the development of SharePoint out of increased self-interest. Today we can implement solutions that we trust and believe in – "sell what you use".
Almost at the same time as the SharePoint topic, a very trustful and fruitful cooperation with FACTON arose which has already existed for more than 10 years. FACTON is the leading manufacturer of the corresponding Enterprise Costing Solution (EPC) FACTON for the calculation of complex and ambitious products in the automotive and technology environment. We are proud to be the partner with the greatest depth of added value – from consulting on calculation schemes and calculation processes to customizing the software and the individual addition of self-developed plugins.
Due to the increased focus on software development and implementation, we became increasingly aware of the value that data in general represent and what assets we generate with the help of these software solutions. Most of the time, however, they remained unused, so we expanded our focus towards reporting and business intelligence – the evaluation of data, its enrichment towards information and its usage for the optimization of the underlying processes. And this completed the circle – processes --> IT solutions --> Reporting/BI --> processes.
Added value through integration
Our pronounced understanding of processes is still the basis for comprehensive and cross-thematic thinking today. We will continue to create benefits for our customers in the future by combining our competencies. For example, we use powerful reporting with modern technologies based on data from complex FACTON calculations or we embed the calculation software in a SharePoint environment to efficiently fulfill workflow and other collaboration requirements.
In the course of many projects and derived from our extensive methodological knowledge, we have developed a toolkit for project and change management, which we can introduce in line with requirements.
From information to knowledge
The most recent addition to BIK's competence pool are semantic networks for mapping complex object dependencies. For about five years now, we have been working intensively on this entry-level technology for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and we are opening the door to an innovation hub in the company with this future-oriented topic. Together with our close partner intelligent views, the manufacturer of the leading semantic platform, we create innovation with immediate business benefits and enable access to Artificial Intelligence applications.
Relationships in the academic world
Since our foundation it has been part of our central self-image to constantly develop ourselves further – and our customers with us. For many years, we have been intensifying and cultivating our relationships to several universities, preferably in Bavaria, but also beyond. BIKies give lectures and accomplany student projects to closely link research, teaching and practice. In addition, we face up to the academic and practice-oriented criticism with our own publications – just take a look at the extensive list of publications on our website (https://bik.biz/en/about-us/publications.html).
For 12 years I have been a member of the editorial team of HMD – Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, a German-language information systems journal, well-established and leading for more than 50 years. This allows us to keep in touch with mentors, leading researchers and practitioners. This fact guarantees our customers that they never miss out on trends and that they can be pioneers. As spokesman of the three-member executive committee of the regional group Middle Franconia of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), I am constantly exerted to identify exciting issues and to bring key personnel to Nuremberg.
Our self-image
The entire BIK team is proud to have built up a broad customer portfolio of well-known and silent stars. Due to a lot of activity and successful projects, we have mostly established ourselves not only as a permanent service provider, but also as a "trusted partner." All BIKies represent the same "basic beliefs" in terms of our service-oriented self-image towards our partners and the personal activity for our contacts. Our customers appreciate our commitment and the fact that we always foreground the specific situation and the objectives of our customer.
The future has begun
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you, our customers and partners, for your trust. We look forward to the next joint decade with exciting issues, trustful contacts and projects, that will make you successful and command your market companions‘ respects.
We enjoy our work and we hope to communicate to you this joy in solving our joint challenges!
Dr. Stefan Reinheimer, founder and managing director of BIK GmbH
