My Interim Management at Meyer Werft ended. After nine and a half months in Papenburg. Time to say goodbye and thank you. Interim CPO assignments are strange things. You arrive, you try to be useful, and then you leave. Whether you actually made a difference, that’s for others to judge, not you. When I joined Meyer Werft in Papenburg (Emsland is enemy territory for a “Grafschafter”;-) ) last September, the task was clear: developing the procurement organization, while simultaneously delivering on IDW S 6 obligations, is not something you do alone. This team did it, and they did it very well. They deepened collaboration across sites and group companies, aligning on shared categories and working through common challenges together, the kind of cross-site synergy work that doesn’t happen unless people actually trust each other enough to have honest conversations. What this team achieved and built in less than a year impresses me: ✅Meyer Werft’s all-new 2028 procurement strategy, shaped by the extended procurement leadership team ✅Exceeding the IDW S 6 requirements. And while that result matters, what matters more to me is how it happened: through work, conversations, and a procurement team that delivered every single week ✅A new organizational structure with clear roles, building new capabilities ✅A PMO lead & process that keeps strategic projects on track ✅A new category management team that also got the tools to do the job properly ✅ A new procurement academy that has already delivered hundreds of training hours ✅A new Procurement Cost Engineering capability and team All this on top of numerous other initiatives and large-scale sourcing projects for the upcoming cruise ships! You all can be proud! Thank you for letting me be a part of it. I’m grateful to Ralf Schmitz (CRO) and Bernd Eikens (CEO) for their trust. To Marcus Schüller, Maxim Przystaw, and the team: thank you for your outstanding support. And special thanks to Vera Lannek for the trustworthy collaboration across company boundaries. What moved me most had nothing to do with deliverables: The farewell from the procurement team, the words, the gifts, the warmth. I genuinely didn’t see that coming. And the messages afterwards, on WhatsApp, by email, here on LinkedIn, that caught me off guard, too, in the best possible way. It meant more to me than I can properly express. Thanks so much, MW Procurement Team! Good luck with everything ahead! I’ll be watching from a distance, rooting for you. 🚢