Martin Schlaman
Head of product development and member of the management board at KUMAVISION
How are modern ERP solutions created that meet the requirements of a digitalized world? Martin Schlamann, Business Unit Manager for Product Development at KUMAVISION, provides exciting insights into product development in an interview. He explains how standardization, automation and the deep integration of the Microsoft stack form the basis for innovations in order to meet the customer needs of tomorrow today.
1. How has product management at KUMAVISION changed in recent years to meet market demands?
KUMAVISION has developed from the classic, customer-specific ERP project business to scalable and standardized product management. Our products are designed to be ready for immediate use in 80% of projects, which significantly reduces the implementation time. With target market-oriented product development, we offer specialized solutions that are precisely tailored to the requirements of various industries. For example, we now offer 6 industry solutions and 28 activation modules (these are additional modules within the industry solutions), which we have already released for 13 country versions (3 DACH, 10 global) and can also test for over 70 Business Central country versions.
2. How does KUMAVISION ensure that new features in the products are useful and market-oriented?
Through our structured innovation process, we ensure that only functions are developed that offer clear added value for our target markets. New features must be able to be used effectively in at least 80 percent of all future projects in order to ensure the efficiency of our solutions. One result is also industry solutions tailored to the target market, which are available in AppSource, for example for architects, engineering firms, real estate developers or occupational safety in wholesale.
3. What role does automation play in product development and software management at KUMAVISION?
Automation is a fundamental part of our product management. It reduces manual testing rounds by over 98 percent and ensures that our products are always up to date - both in the three major releases and in all minor releases. This automation enables us to implement innovations faster and with higher quality, which significantly accelerates product development.
4. How does the customer benefit from the increasing standardization and automation in KUMAVISION products?
Our customers benefit from faster project completions, high quality and transparency. Thanks to automated test cases, our products are particularly stable and reliable. KUMAVISIONDocs automatically generates documentation such as TechDocs and change logs when a release is released. This ensures that our customers are always up to date and can easily access updates without any surprises.
5. How does KUMAVISION integrate the entire Microsoft stack into its products and what added value does this bring to customers?
The entire Microsoft stack is included in every innovation, using not only Business Central but all Microsoft technologies when they are more suitable. This deep integration, especially of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, enables us to offer scalable solutions that cover all of our customers' business processes. The need for individual customization is minimized, which increases efficiency without increasing complexity.
6. What does the future of product development at KUMAVISION look like, especially in terms of innovation and new technologies?
Our strategic direction over the last few years has put KUMAVISION in a position to respond quickly to new market requirements. In the future, automation will be driven even further, supported by telemetry and the deep integration of the Microsoft stack. Artificial intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly important role. AI already supports product development in programming, while in the future it will also make a decisive contribution to the optimization of business processes, although without being the sole focus. The aim is to offer our customers maximum efficiency and added value.
