February 24, 2026
From machines to long-term partnerships: See how HF GROUP uses portals, data and digital services to strengthen customer relationships in industry.
This article is part of a series of interviews conducted for The Voice of Digital Leaders in Manufacturing 2026 report .
Founded in Lübeck in 1889, Dräger is a fifth-generation, family-run, globally listed manufacturer of medical and safety technology. The company’s mission is direct and unusually high-stakes for industrial manufacturing: protect, support and save lives. This context shapes both their product innovation and their approach to connected, data-driven services.
net sales (2024)
employees
Presence in 190-plus countries
Sandra Eggers works in Dräger’s Global Key Account Management organization, focusing on digital sales and business development across large, complex customer environments. Her perspective sits at the intersection of customer operating models, procurement realities and the practical work of making digital experiences modular enough to scale without forcing every customer into a homogenized journey.
“Challenging”
A connected manufacturer story often starts with a promise of one unified experience.
Sandra Eggers, Digital Sales & Business Development Lead at Dräger, starts with a constraint many manufacturers prefer to gloss over: There is no single unified experience that fits every customer.
Dräger serves industries and accounts with different needs, contract models and regulatory environments, and the diversity shows up most sharply in Global Key Account Management, where the job is to assemble the right connected experience for each customer while staying efficient and scalable. In practice, that makes unified experience an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time launch.
“From a global key account perspective, we try to enhance the customer's experience and assemble the different digital touch points that we have in place for Dräger to create an individual unique experience for our customers,” Sandra says.
Still, the direction is unambiguous. Dräger’s digital transformation aims to simplify doing business with Dräger and raise productivity for both customers and internal teams. That means reducing friction and making interactions more reliable.
Dräger’s progress shows up in a few tangible moves:
The picture is positive but incomplete. Commerce and service integration remains hard at full scale. UX consistency across diverse markets remains a moving target. And data and process silos still surface in the seams.
“That’s why we treat ‘unified’ not as a finish line, but as an ongoing transformation we pursue together with our customers,” Sandra says.
Dräger’s digital organization mirrors its customer reality: distributed, collaborative and designed to move across boundaries. Instead of a single central digital transformation unit, responsibility is shared across central functions and local teams.
Central groups such as IT and Sales & Service Excellence help define standards and capabilities. Regional units adapt and implement based on local market requirements.
Product owners and cross-functional decentralized teams take on the responsibility of developing digital products end to end.
Having product owners and holacratic teams enables faster innovation cycles, direct ownership, and a culture where every team member contributes expertise and decision-making, ensuring that our digital initiatives are both agile and closely aligned to customer needs.
— Sandra Eggers, Digital Sales & Business Development Lead at Dräger
But that setup does introduce a trade-off, one Sandra is explicit about. This level of collaboration can add time upfront. She sees that ramp-up as an investment in sustainability, as pilots are easy to launch but notoriously difficult to scale when the broader organization isn’t truly bought in.
“By nurturing this spirit of co-creation, we’re able to turn promising concepts into sustainable solutions that can be successfully scaled across the organization,” she says.
Sandra’s most concrete personal change story comes from an earlier era of digital firsts.
When she joined Dräger in 2011 as the company’s first social media manager, social channels were easy to dismiss in B2B, and skepticism was real. Over time, however, social became a meaningful customer interaction channel at global scale.
“Not all change happens top-down,” Sandra says. “Sometimes, real transformation begins at the grassroots level, when enough people are convinced, passionate and willing to drive it forward. Building an ‘alliance of the willing’ is often the key to lasting and meaningful change.”
On the technology front, Dräger’s ambition is to support connected experience through global templates and a unified data model. This foundation is designed to make customer interactions more consistent and data-driven over time.
But the hard part, especially for global accounts, is orchestration across customer procurement setups:
“The task is less about one uniform journey and more about orchestrating the right connected experience per customer using a modular, standards-based architecture — global templates where they scale, local adapters where they add value — so both customers and Dräger gain efficiency,” Sandra says.
Sandra’s excitement about AI is grounded in using connected-device data to shift service and maintenance from reactive to predictive, reducing downtime and — crucially for Dräger — improving safety outcomes.
She also sees near-term value in:
The most important qualifier is human: in her view, AI doesn’t reduce the importance of human interaction. It raises it.
“I am convinced that AI will not replace people but will actually make human interaction even more important and valuable, especially in sales, where hybrid models can combine digital efficiency with the irreplaceable power of personal relationships,” Sandra says.
As connectivity increases, Dräger treats cybersecurity as a core element of trust, not just a technical checklist, particularly under evolving EU regulatory pressure such as NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act.
The emphasis is on resilient architectures, transparent compliance processes, training and direct dialogue with customers to align on risk and responsibility.
“We try to make our technology future-ready and go hand in hand with our customers to create trust,” Sandra says. “We think that cybersecurity is important for both sides and maybe a game-changer when it comes to the current political and economic landscape.”
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