In the digitalization of the steel industry there are two worlds that meet surprisingly rarely. One begins in the hall: at the saw, at the crane, in the material flow - where digitalization means a machine reporting what it is doing. The other begins in the system: in the ERP, the CRM, the data platform - where digitalization means a company knowing what it is doing.
Anyone who tries to connect the two quickly notices: they are not the same people, not the same vendors, not even the same trade fairs. That is precisely the gap ZirkelTech is now closing in its own leadership.
Two careers, one value chain
Valentin Kaltenbach led the KALTENBACH group for more than two decades - a manufacturer of steel processing machinery with over 130 years of history and around 500 employees worldwide. He then built KALTENBACH.SOLUTIONS, a company that took digitalization directly onto the steel shopfloor: into the machine, the material flow and order tracking.
Zirkel Technologies comes from the other end of the same chain: since 2016 a vendor-neutral consulting and implementation house for the industrial Mittelstand, with more than 400 consultants and engineers across six locations - Frankfurt am Main, Vienna, Zurich, Oakville, Riga and Noida - focused on SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, MuleSoft, Data & AI and custom product engineering.
"Valentin does not bring a network. He brings thirty years of trust with the people who actually run German industry. You cannot hire that. You can only earn it - and he has." Kapil Gupta · Founder and Co-CEO, Zirkel Technologies GmbH
Why this is more than an appointment
Readers of this blog know the pattern: the most expensive gaps in a manufacturing company's system landscape are rarely inside any single system - they sit in between. Between CRM and ERP. Between ERP and hall. Between what the machine knows and what the core system ever learns.
The new leadership team is the personnel answer to exactly that pattern: a leadership that knows both ends of the chain from its own practice - the machines that shape steel, and the systems that run the companies behind them. Joining the two sides is the stated ambition - as delivered work, not as a statement of intent.
"I have spent my career on the shopfloor side of digitalization. Zirkel Technologies brings the enterprise engineering depth to take it all the way into the ERP and beyond. That combination is exactly why I am here." Valentin Kaltenbach · Co-CEO, Zirkel Technologies GmbH
What comes next
For the coming months, ZirkelTech has announced an IoT platform intended to make resources on the steel shopfloor visible, measurable and manageable in real time - designed as a retrofit to existing plant rather than a replacement of it.
The core business remains unchanged: enterprise solutions with SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and MuleSoft. The platform extends that stack downward - into continuous vertical integration from the CRM through the ERP to the shopfloor. The confirmation from the hall that today reaches the core system by shout, note or spreadsheet gets a direct route - and order status, capacity and delivery performance become visible where sales and planning actually work.
More here as soon as there is something to show - delivered, not announced.
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