target Symposium 2019

Our symposium this year took place from November 12 to 13 in Heidelberg and a total of 47 customers and prospects attended on both the conference days at the arthotel, located in the Heidelberg old town.

After introducing the target team, which had undergone some personnel changes since the last symposium in 2017, Roman Scholz, currently preparing for his Master’s degree at target, opened the conference program with the presentation “How can AI make our life easier in Idea Management?”.

In his presentation, Roman Scholz presented a new add-on for Idea Management that he is developing within the scope of his Master’s degree. The objective behind it is to classify ideas with the help of Big Data and Machine Learning in order to support both the idea submitter as well as the idea manager in their daily work.

Following this, Roland Granzer and Andreas Staab from SCHOTT AG presented “Idea Management with the Schott AG App”.

With the new Schott AG app, Roland Granzer and Andreas Staab presented a possibility to seamlessly incorporate target Idea Management within a larger infrastructure. When doing this, the focus was not just set on the finished product, but the way was also shown, together with technical insights and challenges as well as their solutions.

The first symposium day finished with a traditional, rustic evening in the historical inn “Zum Seppl“, which is as renowned in Heidelberg as the castle or the Old Bridge.

The second day of the conference was kicked-off with the presentation by K+S with the title “Germany’s Best Idea Management”. K+S Aktiengesellschaft was awarded the Germany Idea Management Prize 2019 by the Idea Management Center for “Best Idea Management”. The presenters, Markus Bock, Ralf Brandau, Carsten Diehl and Martin Koller demonstrated the strengths of K+S Idea Management and explained that the value of good Idea Management goes way beyond the value of the actual idea. K+S also presented concrete figures related to the economic benefit derived through Idea Management. At the same time, concrete trends of derived benefits were explained as well as methods with which these could be further increased. The good integration with target software was repeatedly emphasized.

This topic was followed by the presentation of innovations from target development under the title “The Beautiful Life of an Idea in Fiori”.

In the first part of the presentation, Robin Müller-Cajar showed together with his target colleagues Maria Sanudo, Andreas Breitschu and Márton Balogh in a fun live demo about Idea Management the current status of Idea Management SP 8.2. He also showed that not just good software is necessary for good Idea Management, but also a good process in which primarily people are present.

In the second part, he went again into detail about concrete innovations of SP 8.2, presented improvements, new developments, and the planned further development topics. Robin Müller-Cajar underlined here that with this Service Pack the next milestone had been set since the whole process can now also be represented in Fiori.

In the third and last part, the “Platform for the Exchange of Ideas” was introduced as a new tool that is currently in development and that will make it possible to exchange ideas between systems in a targeted manner.

The last agenda topic of the day once again gave our customers and prospects the chance to exchange ideas in workshops. The following topics were available in the groups:

• “Make a Wish”
  In this workshop the participants led by Achim Noe could discuss further developments that they would like to see realized by target (some customers were surprised to learn about functionality that they had not previously been aware of). The wishes that were submitted and agreed upon will be incorporated in our development planning by the time our next symposium comes around.
• “Create a Campaign”
  In this workshop, Robin Müller-Cajar demonstrated using an example how an attractive campaign can also be created and managed with a small budget and without a designer using target software. In addition, tips from experiences in the field were shared, how to successfully get a first campaign up and running and to therefore to avoid campaigns losing momentum right at the start.

The participants once again evaluated this event extremely positively. As in previous years, the opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues and with the target team was highlighted as being very valuable.

The evaluation of the feedback forms resulted in an average mark of 1.5 (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the most positive mark).

Here are some remarks from participants:

• “With the developments at target we can derive a genuine added value for our Idea Management.”
  Markus Bock, K+S Aktiengesellschaft
• “From real life for the future!”
  Dr. Anton Bumann, armasuisse/VBS
• “Good insight – honest, transparent and modern.”
  Thomas Linneweh, Stadtwerke München Services GmbH
• “Very informative and interesting. Highly recommended!”
  Dietmar Schade, Volkswagen AG

We would like to sincerely thank the presenters from K+S and SCHOTT for presenting their Idea Management to our conference participants!

Of course, we also thank all participants for this successful event and look forward to being able to welcome you to the next target symposium!

Symposium Gallery