Beroa Deutschland expects to extend the maintenance activities to new regions and sectors.

The merger of Karrena GmbH and the Burwitz Group to create Beroa Deutschland GmbH (BDE) has become one of the most important refractory installation and chimney construction companies in the world and the Beroa Group’s flagship, combining the knowledge in project activities of Karrena Project Divisions with the flexible maintenance activities of Burwitz subsidiaries and branch offices.

In order to allow a better resources combination and a simplified administration, many of individual companies of the group, working in Germany, have been merged into BDE, such as Lichtenberg GmbH, GMI GmbH, Burwitz Ruhr GmbH and Burtherm Feurungsbau GmbH.

Some other companies such as Karrena Glas or F&S, where Beroa has partners, remain independent. With this new dimension of the company, Beroa Deutschland expects to extend the maintenance activities to some sectors or German regions where the company has not had a strong presence. On the other hand, the firm wants to combine the knowledge coming from both sides to develop as a leader on refractory and chimney technology worldwide.

The team, the key of the company
The new management of the company combines the international experience of Iván Fernández with the local market knowledge of Wolfgang Mundt.

Iván, former Karrenas’s responsible for Spain and Latin America has acquired 15 years of experience in the refractory field, all of them within the company. Wolfgang joined the Burwitz Group several years ago after a successful career at a well known German steel producer.

Company’s team combines experience and willingness to grow. To the highly professional project department leaders such as Rüdiger Rasch and Hermann Hoffmeister the company has added the experience of Jürgen Dausend and the refractory know-how of Volker Palten, Georg Zündorff and Ulrich Posingis.

Dieter Mühlböch joined the company in the first quarter to lead the Energy and Environment department with a focus on the export activities. An agreement has been also reached with an external consultant to support the firm on the petrochemical worldwide sales. Rolf Wilder coordinates a very valuable team of quite young but highly experienced managers for the maintenance activities.

Frank Kreibich leads all former Burwitz subsidiaries where Thomas Budach, Peter Andersch, Thomas Schmidt and Viktor Klaus have shown their value to assure great results. As a first outcome of the new organizational structure, a new department has been created for the maintenance in the energy, environment and chemical industries, led by Frank Zocher.

Also the Testovens department led by Manfred Globke is developing even better than expected. Rolf has also the task to optimize the use of the site resources of BDE taking advantage of the excellent work by Günter Freise and Frank Kreibich. On the technology side, Ulrich Posingis leads a highly motivated team where Dr. Uwe Dietz, Dr. Karsten Zolldann and Olaf Kotzan can contribute to the aforementioned development as technology leaders.

The administration departments have already shown their capability to adapt very fast to the new structure. Thanks to the great work of Andreas Böckler, head of the financial department and Reiner Bodenstein, administrative manager of the Burwitz subsidiaries, the SAP system has been implemented within these subsidiaries without any impact on the year end closing.

Reiner together with Annette Bellendorf has also the challenging task to develop the human resources group, an important asset of the company. Peter Stowasser, as head of the legal affairs and insurance department will give all the advise they need and will help all sales departments on the difficult issues related to contracts and claims. As a first step to involve people in the future of the company a “Beroa 2014 Future Workshop” took place in March of this year, where more than fifty employees met to give their own ideas and suggestions to improve the company. Afterwards these ideas will be analyzed and extended in another meeting of all managers including the general management.

All the employees, from project managers and administration crew to refractory masons are the key to our success. The biggest asset is their knowledge. Should never be forgotten the importance of the site managers and supervisors as they are the ones who spend more time together with customers and are responsible for a great deal of the image that the client receives regarding the company.

In addition to this, Beroa Deutschland counts on the support and the experience of Manfred Steiger, president, and Gerd Venn, vice-president, who will lead some strategic actions. This excellent team will focus on improving the service to customers while providing the most competitive possible price but without sacrificing quality and safety.

Zero accidents
Quality and safety are major issues for Beroa Deutschland. The different branches have certified management systems since many years ago and are working on creating a unified concept, led by Carina Rieker, Cesare Pavone and Lothar Schmidt. This team is also working to adapt the safety management system according to SCC 2006, a high recognized certification in Central Europe, coming from the exigent chemical and petrochemical industry, to the world more extended OHSAS 18.001. Continuous training of the crew is basic for achieving the goal of “Zero accidents” and involving subcontractors in this task is another key issue.

Through the Beroa Refractory Safety Committee, the company is working on learning about the best practices throughout the world in order to keep improving.

The main challenge
A major challenge for the company is to reinforce Beroa’s brand in the market using the strength of two well known names as Karrena and Burwitz.

It is important to be successful in allowing customers to identify the new company with the values of the merged ones exhibiting attributes such as quality, technology, reliability and full service. The firm’s international presence has to be increased in new growing markets as in the coming years there appears to be little investment expected in Western Europe, from the heavy industries that represent customers. Such growing markets are, for example, Eastern Europe, Middle East, Far East and the USA.

The chimney department, with a high international experience, is also looking to develop itself in new activities such as silos, cooling towers or LNG tanks. Meanwhile the company must keep on increasing the market share on the local refractory maintenance market and extend the presence to new potential customers.

To enter these new markets the firm needs to differentiate itself by providing the most efficient solution to customers. This solution has to combine the best technology available, the optimal cost structure and the right project management team. Beroa Deutschland has to understand the customer needs and focus itself on the key issues to convince them that Beroa’s solution is the best one. Price will always be important but the company has to provide technical proposals that might bring clients a mid-term advantage or assure reaction times and/or project delays that result in an immediate benefit for them.

Beroa Deutschland is confident that its team at the headquarters in Ratingen and its branches in Peine, Eisenhüttenstadt, Neuss, Stemwede, Neuenrade and Nürtingen will be able to successfully achieve all of these goals.