Clear Vision - Bayer Technology Services (BTS) supports the Bayer subgroups and external customers with the development of production processes and products as well as with the planning, construction and optimization of plants. The Leverkusen-based technology service provider, which posted sales of roughly €380 million in 2009 and has some 2,600 employees worldwide, has been expanding its presence in growth markets in recent years and now boasts 22 offices in 10 countries. The company also sharpened its focus on expanding its product and technology portfolio and growing its external business. Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne has been the managing director of BTS since June 2010. Dr. Michael Reubold spoke with him about his plans and vision for the company.

CHEManager: Dr. Van Meirvenne, BTS expanded substantially under your predecessor, particularly through new offices outside Germany. How is the company aligned today, and will you continue this expansion strategy?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: We have a remarkably global alignment today, and we will continue to work on this. I regard the development of BTS in recent years into an innovative, global company to be a first-class achievement by my predecessor and our colleagues. BTS currently has regional offices in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, India, China and Singapore. This is something we will be building on.

What are the pillars of your strategy?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: We are continuously refining our strategy. We do this by answering questions about our future strengths, for example. Or in which areas can we further differentiate ourselves from the competition. Which products and services do we want to offer individually for a specific country? What kind of company do we want to be in five years? We continue to rely on what we call functional growth - functional growth that serves to continuously improve the technological performance of BTS, including for our external customers.

As a subgroup, BTS is first and foremost a service provider for Bayer. How does your parent company feel about the growth and expansion of your external business?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: The interaction with the outside world helps us to continuously improve and is thus an advantage to the Bayer Group and all of our external customers. We want to maintain a healthy balance between projects for Bayer and projects for external customers. We must work continuously to ensure that our products and services are competitive. BTS is continuously improving as a result, which is one of the reasons why we do this.

What is the ratio between internal and external business?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: Our goal is to do roughly one-quarter of our business outside Bayer. We want the market to see us as a company with a reasonable portfolio of partners, competences and technologies. We still have to grow more externally to get there.

New Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers wants to cut jobs in mature markets and invest in emerging regions. Does that adversely impact your growth strategy?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: No, on the contrary. The sharpened focus on emerging countries fits with our strategy. You have to support expansion into new markets with the buildup of local talents. I consider developing local talent and local know-how in those areas where Bayer is doing business to be an important task for BTS. One example of this is China, where Bayer has been present for decades and has invested more than €2 billion in production facilities in recent years. Our roughly 750 employees in Shanghai enable us to implement these mega investments safely and reliably. BTS is still very small in India, for example, but Bayer is aiming to grow strongly in India. Here, too, it will once again be upon BTS to develop local engineering talents.

You also opened an office in the Middle East, in Dubai, where Bayer itself does not have any production facilities. Is the focus there on developing external business?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: The Middle East region is relevant to the chemistry business in particular, and especially with respect to the more upstream oriented processes. It is important that we be there with our competence in the area of operational excellence, for instance. Furthermore, our push to become more familiar with the region early on by means of concrete projects also represents value to the Bayer Group in the long term. It is a similar situation with our office in Singapore, where we also do a lot of work with external customers. If we develop technical competences there and can be competitive with local employees, that is also in Bayer's interest in the long run.

You just raised the question of where BTS's strengths lie. How would you answer this question?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: Our greatest strength is surely our "owner's mentality." With these we mean the passion for treating customer projects as if they were our own and doing things right from the very beginning. We want to create value for our customers. The fact that we possess the entire range of competences, from conceptual design, process development and basic engineering to construction management, process simulation and startup know-how is a unique competitive advantage.

Our BayOpX operational excellence concepts for boosting the availability of apparatus and plants, for increasing energy and raw material yields, and for ensuring compliance with product specifications have been in strong demand for several years now. We are continuing to develop and advance in this area

Another BTS strength is our ability to develop and apply enabling technologies, i.e., technologies that are important for the future of the Bayer subgroups and our customers. Here you have to think beyond the limits of normal innovation budgets. An example is the new INVITE research center at Chempark Leverkusen, which BTS established together with Technische Universität (TU) Dortmund. Industrial partners are engaged here in pre-competitive collaboration on new concepts for the "Factory of the Future", for example. We want to further expand this role as an enabler of future technologies, increasingly also by means of partnerships as with INVITE. This innovation far out on the horizon is important for the future. With it, we are creating a true competitive advantage for our customers.

As you just said, that is far off in the future. How do you hope to develop the BTS technology and service portfolio in the medium term?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: We want to balance our very broad portfolio and precisely position ourselves in the relevant markets. We are the global leaders in some areas of engineering; in others, we are working to get there. Always following the owner's engineering philosophy. Our competence goes back beyond engineering, however. We can develop reactions, perform them on a laboratory scale, pilot them and scale them up to production scale. We can size the entire plant and optimize the process. We have a comprehensive know-how chain before it even gets to basic engineering, which is the starting point for many of our competitors. This integration of services leads to top performance in engineering.

A second element is everything having to do with contract research, process development and process design. This is another key platform for Bayer, which we will continue to expand. It also includes focusing on plant and process safety and process management technologies.

Which regions are the most important for your growth?

Dr. Dirk Van Meirvenne: It isn't a matter of regions, but of functional growth that we can only achieve with well-trained employees. People are the crucial factor. They determine how we can further refine our corporate culture in order to always offer the best solution for our customers and our partners. We consider very carefully how we can link organizational improvements with the motivation of the employees so that improvement is also fun. Enjoying your job means being open for new possibilities, new projects, new horizons. That is the challenge facing many companies. And we will do everything possible to ensure that this highly competent organization can further differentiate itself on the market through its motivation.