5 min read

Petra Novák

What she needs: A managed connector that works without an IT team, costs something predictable, and stays out of her way. What she will not do: Self-host, learn Kubernetes, or hire a consultant. Why she buys: A tier-1 customer deadline she cannot miss.

Operations manager at a tier-3 automotive supplier, 19 years at the same family-owned firm, handling external digital systems by default because the firm cannot afford a dedicated IT team. She has four months to satisfy a Catena-X mandate from a major customer and needs the connector to work, cost something reasonable, and not become her problem every month.

Role: Operations Manager, tier-3 automotive components supplier (85 employees)

Background

Petra has worked at the same family-owned components manufacturer for nineteen years, joining as a production coordinator and working her way into operations management. She does not have a technology background, her degree is in industrial engineering, but she has managed the firm’s ERP implementation, its transition to cloud-based accounting, and more recently its first EDI integrations with tier-1 customers. She is the person at the company who handles anything involving external digital systems, not because she sought the role but because she is the most capable person available and the firm cannot afford a dedicated IT team. She is pragmatic, time-poor, and has no patience for complexity that does not directly serve a business outcome. She first heard about Catena-X six months ago in an email from one of the firm’s major customers. The deadline in that email is in four months.

Responsibilities

Petra manages day-to-day operations across production scheduling, supplier coordination, and customer delivery. She handles all external system integrations, EDI, customer portals, logistics platforms, and is the internal escalation point when any of them fails. She now carries an additional responsibility she did not ask for: getting the company connected to Catena-X before the customer deadline, which means understanding what a dataspace connector is, finding a provider, managing the onboarding process, and ensuring the firm can exchange the data its customer requires without disrupting production operations.

Challenges

Petra is being asked to procure and implement infrastructure she has never encountered before, on a timeline set by a customer rather than by her firm’s own capacity to absorb the work. The documentation she has found online assumes a level of technical familiarity she does not have. Every provider she has looked at seems to assume she has an IT team. The cost of the options she has evaluated so far, some exceeding €300 per month in infrastructure alone, is difficult to justify to her CEO for a mandate that generates no direct revenue. She also carries the anxiety that she will implement something incorrectly and create a compliance exposure, a security issue, or a disruption to the customer relationship she is trying to protect.

Goals

Petra’s goal is straightforward: satisfy the customer mandate, on time, at a cost the company can absorb, without creating new operational complexity. She wants the onboarding process to be self-service and clear enough that she can complete it without hiring a consultant. She wants the ongoing operational overhead to be as close to zero as possible, a connector that runs in the background, managed by someone else, that she only has to think about if something goes wrong. And she wants to be able to explain to her CEO what they are paying for and why it is necessary.

Technology use

Petra uses the company’s ERP daily and is comfortable with web-based business tools. She is not a developer and does not interact with infrastructure directly. She evaluates software by whether the onboarding process is clear, whether the pricing is transparent, and whether support is reachable when something goes wrong. She will not self-host anything, the firm has no Kubernetes cluster and no one to run one. She makes purchasing decisions based on clarity, cost, and confidence that the vendor will still be operating in three years.

Needs from Kaphera Cloud

Petra needs an onboarding experience that guides her through the process in plain language, without assuming prior knowledge of dataspaces, connectors, or identity infrastructure. She needs pricing that is transparent and predictable, a fixed monthly cost she can put in a budget line without qualification. She needs the connector to run without requiring her ongoing attention: certificate management, credential updates, and infrastructure operations should be invisible to her. She needs a support channel that responds in human time when something breaks, because she has no internal fallback. She needs confidence that the provider is operating on EU infrastructure and that the data her firm exchanges is handled compliantly, this will come up in her CEO conversation and she needs a clear answer. And she needs the whole process, from signing up to exchanging data, to be completable without engaging an external consultant, because the firm’s budget does not have room for one.

Quote “My customer told me I need this. I just need it to work, cost something reasonable, and not become my problem every month.”

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