Frictionless by design
At B2B Online in Berlin, Tanja’s talk on “frictionless by design” drew praise for being concrete and pragmatic. “I focused on how manufacturers are able to reduce the friction across every single touchpoint that we have with our customers,” she says.
Röhm’s customers expect value in every interaction, and they expect Röhm to be able to support them and whatever processes they’ve built. That’s Tanja’s focus for the next 12 months.
Keeping pace with those expectations means shifting how Röhm’s teams prefer to work, Tanja says. Röhm must meet their customers where they are: in their own systems, on their own portals, within their own regulatory constraints.
But at the moment, Röhm’s experience still creates fragmented journeys. “We're using different applications, for example, from the website, as opposed to what we would use for our procurement platform,” Tanja says. “And they're not yet all fully integrated into the CRM or to the ERP. I would argue we still have some room there in order to really make it seamless.”
The company has begun tailoring experiences based on buyer roles and responsibilities — giving logistics teams the tools to track deliveries, strategic buyers visibility into contracts and operational users what they need to keep production running smoothly.
But the biggest leap in the experience is coming from automation in the background.
Röhm is preparing to roll out its available-to-promise capabilities, moving from pilot to full deployment. The goal is to automatically check inventory the moment an order arrives and return an immediate confirmation. When real-time is not possible, the system will still deliver a fast, accurate response so customers can plan around reliable delivery dates and volumes.
The advanced version adds automated prioritization, using back-order insights in SAP to decide which customers should be fulfilled first based on factors like region or contract status.
These changes are already reshaping the work of customer service and procurement teams. “We've piloted it,” Tanja says. “It's worked extremely well. When an order comes in, we're able to get that response. It works just as well with our procurement platform as it would with an order coming in by email, so from a customer's ERP system.”
This all creates a virtuous cycle, Tanja says. With procurement and customer service teams not having to manually enter orders anymore, data-entry errors go down, and job satisfaction rates rise.
Happy employees make happy customers. That’s something I really believe in. Get rid of that manual work that doesn’t make people happy.
— Tanja Tschech, Digital Transformation Manager at Röhm
Smaller, business-led teams
Inside Röhm, digital isn’t run as a distant, central initiative. It’s embedded in smaller, business-driven teams focused on specific processes and workstreams.
“We've changed quite a bit now as to how we're working,” Tanja says. “We have much smaller teams that are working on specific work streams and processes. They're smaller, and they're also more independent. That's served us really well in automating a lot of these processes.”
Those teams are anchored in the business, with IT as an essential partner rather than the primary driver. Process mapping and pain point discovery are now standard practice. Within IT, program and project management discipline has tightened.
For Tanja, the hardest part of digital isn’t the technology. It’s ensuring she’s bringing everyone on the digital journey with her. She’s learned this the hard way by launching projects that were too ahead of their time for the organization. Her advice: Embed digital into workstreams, stay close to real-world pain points and be pragmatic about ambition.
Advice: Getting the foundations right
For any organization looking to follow a similar path, Tanja recommends first ensuring that you have global tools that can power global processes. “What's really helped us to scale up quickly is to have one global ERP, one global CRM system worldwide,” she says. “That way, we're able to implement processes across all of these applications quite quickly.”
The right partners bring the system together. “Make sure you have the right partners. We don't have all of knowledge of SAP within our organization. Our partner landscape has been extremely important to us, as well.”
My biggest recommendation is to consistently communicate with your teams, with the employees, to understand what their pain points are and bring them on the journey with you.
— Tanja Tschech, Digital Transformation Manager at Röhm
One global ERP, one global CRM, one AI roadmap
Röhm’s unified foundations provide a single source of truth and underpin the digital experience. But there’s an intentional, built-in constraint: minimizing customization to keep cost and complexity under control. “We're trying not to customize SAP,” Tanja says. “That's one of our challenges, of course.”
This thinking, though, allows Tanja and her team to continuously probe their own understanding of the organization’s digital maturity: Where does the ERP have the biggest impact? Do we have the right partners on this journey? What can we improve, and what can we do differently? Tanja says they regularly evaluate their tools and partners for fitness for purpose and cost efficiency.
On emerging tech, especially AI, Tanja is enthusiastic but grounded. “We're taking a very internal perspective, first off, on artificial intelligence,” she says. “We’re really focusing a lot on employee efficiency initially before we start doing a lot of customer-facing AI.”
She sees clear potential in agents that support both customers and sales. Today, Röhm is running initial pilots in planning processes. Sales-supporting agents are next. The vision is to have AI agents support sales teams with market insights.
“We're just looking at building them right now and also looking at potential suppliers to support us,” Tanja says.
But she’s careful not to overstate maturity. “We're still very much in the early phases right now,” she says. AI is emerging inside key processes like automation and machine learning for order intake, but broad deployment is still on the horizon.
The road ahead for Röhm
The journey will be iterative, and for Tanja that’s part of the appeal.
In a past role, Tanja helped create an augmented reality experience that visualized perfume ingredients and their sustainable sourcing. The project, showcased at Heathrow Airport, became a standout achievement — a blend of creativity, design thinking and teamwork that left her genuinely moved when it launched. “I literally cried with happiness when it went live,” she says.
That’s the final piece of Röhm’s digital foundation: A passion for innovation that burns hot enough to fuel whatever comes next.
