What do you know about tax regulations in Germany?

“What do you know about tax regulations in Germany?” asked my good friend David.

“Nothing” I replied. “I know a couple of words in German but not much more than that”.

“Perfect” he said, “we’ve got a new project in Germany and I knew that you were the right man for the job, when can you start?”

To be honest I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry but I decided to play along.

“I can only come around mid-July” I said, “until then I’m a bit busy”.

“O’rite” he said disappointed, “we’re already behind schedule but we’ll wait”.

I booked a flight and asked my dear friend Joe to pick me up and take me to the airport on a bright Saturday morning.

That night I suffered from a terrible stomach ache and couldn’t sleep. In the morning, when Joe came to pick me up I was still in agony and looked half dead. I asked him if we could make a small detour and stop for a few minutes at the hospital.

“Put the suitcase in the boot” I said, “just in case …”.

In A&E they started pumping drugs into me in order to fight off the pain. After throwing at me pretty much every pill in the arsenal of painkillers they introduced me to a lovely companion called morphine.

Six weeks later and minus one gall bladder, I finally made it to Germany to start the project.

A very interesting company who switched from SAP to Priority.

German mentality is ever so slightly different from the British mentality. They can be very strict with you and give you a really hard time during meetings and heated discussions but at the end of the day we can all go to the pub and be best friends.

Actually, come to think about it, this is exactly the same as the British mentality.

Also, every time I showed them something that they didn’t like, the standard reply was “according to German law you have to do it this way …”.

It seems like the German law has consulted each one of the company’s employees and passed the legislations according to their heart desires.

Being an approved drug manufacturer (FDA), their new system had to be validated. This meant thorough testing of every single aspect of the system, generating documentation at a very high standard (German) and complying with quality control that is second to none.

Go live was scheduled to the first week of July 2016. Which meant that I spent the most exciting two weeks of the European cup in Germany.

In support of the Italian team I bought an Italian flag and went to watch the quarter final match between Italy and Germany in an Italian restaurant.

It didn’t help. Germany still won in penalty kicks and I kept watching the team climbing up the ladder all the way to the semi-finals where they lost to the #$^@’# French.

The things I like most about doing projects is the people.

The people at Neovii Biotech were very nice, accommodating and pleasant to work with.

Neovii Biotech is a manufacturer of drugs made of rodent (rabbit) blood helping to fight cancer.

This short description is probably not doing enough justice to what this company is doing.

Priority is supporting multiple languages such as French, German and even Chinese. The problem is … that I don’t.

So a company of 60 users which has a full German interface is now working with the English interface simply because this damn Brexit imbecile supporter can’t speak German.

Speaking of Brexit, the two weeks spent in Germany were right after Britain voted itself out of the EU.

I’m not going to comment on this decision, but the comments that I had from my German colleagues were extremely interesting.

Funny enough they ranged from “Oh my god what have you done?” to “We want out too!”.

According to the BBC one of the good things about Brexit is that it rejuvenated the local holiday making industry by making the British people poorer.

Many holiday makers decided to stay in the UK and not to travel abroad because they can’t afford it now.

Part of the implementation took place in Switzerland as well.

The commercial side of the business is based in yodel country and exporting to the rest of the world in order to get tax reliefs. I don’t understand exactly how it works but apparently it does.

One thing I can say about the land of cuckoo clocks and Swiss cheese; they sure make a hell of a chocolate. Better than Belgium.

In summary, between Swiss fondue and German Wurst we also managed to spend a few minutes and implement a system with logistics, CRM, financials, QC and WMS.

Written by:

Adar Hamm

Head of UK Operations

Medatech UK

To find out more about Adar click here for our management page