FINOW Rohrsysteme GmbH is a German manufacturer with deep industrial roots, operating continuously since 1893. Across more than a century of work, the company has delivered over 1,500 projects for some of the most demanding sectors in the world — nuclear and thermal power generation, offshore wind, oil and gas, chemicals.

FINOW’s reference list reads like a map of European critical infrastructure: the Leibstadt nuclear power plant (KKL) in Switzerland, the Ptolemais V thermal plant with Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems, the Borkum Riffgrund 2 offshore wind farm, Yara, Wacker Chemicals, Steinmüller Engineering. The plant runs at 3,600 tonnes of annual output, 220,000 production hours, and 20,000 m² of workshop floor — supplying components for projects where quality and safety simply cannot fail.

FINOW first approached OntargIT in late 2023. The company was entering a new phase of growth, consolidating manufacturing capacity and operational know-how at its German site — and the technical and organisational complexity of that consolidation needed an answer.

Inside one factory now worked teams with genuinely different production cultures: engineers, technologists, and managers from several European countries, each bringing established habits and expectations. The result was a cultural mix that played out every day on the shop floor — an entrepreneurial, fast-moving East European mindset alongside the structured, standards-first German engineering tradition. Both had real strengths. Both needed to fit inside one operating model.

Three further challenges sat alongside the cultural one:

• Five separate IT systems run finance, production, and warehouse operations in parallel — and barely speaking to each other. Reconciliation was a manual job.
• A web of overlapping industry codes — EN, ASME, PED, and others. Each defined its own rules for documentation, quality control, and production processes. In several places, the codes contradicted one another, and the system had to accommodate that.
• A tight delivery window. First go-live was scheduled for 1 January 2025. The team had less than a year.

OntargIT opened with a diagnostic in March 2024 and made the defining call early: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management would serve as the single platform for finance, procurement, warehouse, and production. The implementation philosophy was equally clear — lean on standard platform capability, keep customisation to a minimum, and switch off legacy systems in phases as the new one earned trust.

What the team delivered:

• A platform that holds two working cultures at once. The pace and pragmatism of the East European entrepreneurial school sit alongside the rigour and predictability of German engineering practice. The system runs on consistent rules but leaves enough room for the judgement calls that complex manufacturing always demands.
• A solution built around real industry codes. EN, ASME, PED, and others each carry their own requirements for documentation, quality control, and production. The team architected the platform to run those regimes in parallel — including the cases where their requirements pull in opposite directions.
• OntargIT’s first standard German localisation of Microsoft Dynamics 365. The finance consultants, certified in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), learned the specifics of German accounting on the project and configured the platform to meet German statutory requirements.
• Real cost transparency at the project level. FINOW now sees the actual cost of each project — materials, labour hours, equipment time, overhead — drawn from live data rather than estimates.
• A multinational team running on one rhythm. Specialists from several European countries, professional interpreters for working sessions, and English as the project’s working documentation language kept the work moving.

The first go-live landed on 1 March 2025 — two months past the original 1 January target. For a project of this size and ambition, that was a controlled slippage, not a setback. Finance, warehouse, production, procurement, and logistics all went live together. The manufacturing preparation block (drawing → routing → materials) is being phased in as the client finalises its unified materials and components catalogue.