Another milestone set: PTA now manages 4000 IT projects in its in-house knowledge base
The management consultancy PTA GmbH, headquartered in Mannheim, has set another significant milestone in its more than 50-year company history. Germany’s oldest, family-run IT and management consultancy now has 4000 IT projects in its in-house knowledge base. This extensive collection reads like an encyclopedia of information technology. It is proof of the unique range of knowledge that PTA consultants can draw on, but also provides an impressive overview of the IT technologies and disciplines that have shaped day-to-day business across all industries in recent decades and which are currently driving digitalization. As future competence and sustainability have always been an important guideline for the PTA Group, not only in IT matters, the company is stabilizing an area of 4,000 square metres by planting native trees as part of its commitment to the Bergwaldprojekt e.V. (mountain forest project).
4000 successfully completed IT projects in over 50 years of company history speak for themselves and are certainly anything but commonplace, especially in the fast-moving IT sector. Dr. Tim Walleyo, Managing Director of management consultancy PTA GmbH, agrees: “We can be proud of what we have achieved together. We can look back on a history of success, on the basis of which we can offer our customers a unique wealth of IT expertise. Our consultants also have a broad spectrum of process and industry knowledge. This enables us, for example, to reliably maintain and support our customers’ legacy systems that are at the end of their life cycle and accompany them on their path to digitalization.”
The evolution of IT documented in the project database
The knowledge base, in which PTA archives all IT projects, has now been in existence for over 30 years. PTA’s IT experts have successively added projects dating back even further to the unique knowledge base, so that anyone interested can now access over 52 years of experience. The founding years of Programmier-Technische Arbeiten (PTA) GmbH, founded in Mannheim in May 1969, were already accompanied by important German and even international events in information technology. The Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet, was launched in the USA and the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) e. V. was founded in Germany in September 1969. At that time, PTA had no access to networks – programs and data were punched onto punch cards and processed on IBM host computers with nightly rented computing time.
From dialog orientation …
The transition from batch processing to dialog-oriented data processing systems such as the VAX/VMS from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and the VS systems from Wang Laboratories not only changed the way PTA consultants worked. At that time, users in companies also used screens for data processing, i.e. the first digital dialog systems. At the time, the PTA experts were involved in system-related developments, such as a restart/recovery-capable central data management system, which was developed for Wang VS years before the manufacturer was able to offer its own relational database system.
… about client/server architectures …
The heyday of relational database systems (RDBMS) finally began in the decade from 1989 to 1999. These could be operated platform-independently and the PTA consultants documented the associated development environments and standardized project procedures in a separate PTA project manual. This laid the foundation for a sustainable expansion of the customer base. At the same time, standard software conquered the market, replacing many of the PTA’s customized applications. Thanks to their in-depth knowledge of the business processes, the IT experts were also able to implement, adapt and further develop standard ERP products without any problems. The advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) also heralded a major change. The starting signal for the “digital revolution” was given and with it new challenges and market opportunities opened up for PTA developers.
… towards apps and web technologies
With the transition to the new millennium, the development of individual solutions therefore focused on web-based applications. The range of applications was wide and ranged from business functions and portals to web stores and apps for mobile devices. Open source development environments replaced the Oracle tools used for the client-server environments. SAP also paid tribute to this development, replacing the host-based SAP R/2 systems with the client/server-based SAP R/3 and creating a completely new basis with NetWeaver and the Web Application Server, so that PTA was subsequently able to support many user companies with their upgrades to SAP ERP 6.0. But the date problem at the turn of the year 2000 and the currency changeover from the Deutschmark to the euro in 2002 also brought the PTA team additional project business. The IT experts were able to market their knowledge profitably, particularly in the adaptation of older applications such as Cobol and PL/1 programs on host systems.
… as well as Cloud and DBP+
However, calling up applications via the Internet was only the first stage in utilizing the enormous possibilities of this medium throughout the company. Increasing storage capacities and transmission speeds paved the way for the provision of extensive services via the Internet. These range from infrastructure (Iaas) to entire software systems (Saas). And the cloud acts as a network. In this way, the manufacturers of standard software now primarily offer customer-oriented IT functions based on CRM as cloud solutions, meaning that PTA is now a reliable and competent implementation partner on the market for all issues relating to SAP C/4HANA, MS Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, regardless of the manufacturer. At the same time, PTA developed its own model for the digitalization of products and business processes with the Digital Business Platform – Plus (DBP+), on the basis of which individual extensions can be developed for customers to give them an advantage over the competition.
In addition to advancing digitalization, in the course of which PTA is shaping the continuous optimization of internal processes, the IT consultants are consistently focusing on cloud platform technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics and machine learning. This allows existing products and services to be improved on the one hand and new, pioneering IT landscapes to be realized on the other. IT has long since developed into a strategic factor in companies. A factor that, with digital twins and artificial intelligence, is decisively driving development and innovation processes not only in the manufacturing industry, but also in service companies such as banks and insurance companies or in the healthcare sector.
And no matter which solutions are required in which industry: With their experience from 4,000 IT projects, the experts at PTA are available to provide reliable and competent support in all matters. If you would like to know more about PTA’s numerous projects, you can obtain a detailed overview free of charge.
PTA reforests 4000 m² of forest in the mountain forest project
Since future competence and sustainability have always been important guidelines for the PTA Group, not only in IT matters, the company is supporting the stabilization of 4000 square meters of local forest with a donation to Bergwaldprojekt e.V.. In the fall, the PTA management will help with the reforestation at a planting day as part of the conservation project in Neu-Anspach in the Hochtaunus district. The last three years of drought have shown impressively that such a commitment is absolutely necessary. Climate change has really taken off and poses huge problems for native forest ecosystems, as they can only adapt to the changed environmental conditions in the long term. Natural forest communities and the abandonment of non-native spruce monocultures offer the best conditions for this. To promote biodiversity and the stability of our forests, the mountain forest project is therefore committed to forest conversion in favor of native tree species such as the sessile oak, the small-leaved lime, the Norway maple, the bird cherry and the rare wild service tree. A task for which the PTA Group believes it pays off in many respects to be fully committed to supporting this future-oriented project in a sustainable and long-term manner.
