There's a sentence Sascha and I hear, in one form or another, surprisingly often:
"That's just how we've always done it."
Sometimes it's followed by a spreadsheet. Sometimes by an approval sent over email. Sometimes by a process involving five people, none of whom can really say why.
And quite often there's still that one person in the company who knows exactly how everything fits together. As long as they're around, it works. Somehow.
At vensas, we work on software and process digitalization every day. Over the years we've learned one thing: the most interesting digitalization problems are rarely written down in a digital strategy. They're hiding in everyday work.
That's exactly why we're starting an experiment. We're looking for Germany's weirdest process. And for the winner, we'll build a first custom software solution worth €10,000.
Of all things, the German government gave us the idea
The story behind the campaign actually starts somewhere completely different.
Germany has been debating digitalization for years. Since 2025 there's even been a dedicated Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization. At the same time, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation SPRIND has been trying out new formats to surface concrete problems and then build solutions for them.
One approach caught our attention in particular: "Deutschland, was geht?" ("Germany, what's going on?"). The joint initiative by SPRIND and the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization asked people where administration and bureaucracy get stuck in everyday life. 27,707 submissions came in. From those, topic areas and concrete challenges were developed and put to a vote. In the next step, selected teams build prototypes for the prioritized problems.
We thought the core idea was pretty strong: listen first. Then spot the patterns. Then decide which problems are actually relevant enough to solve.
And at some point we sat there with a thought:
Why don't we do this for companies?
Not by asking which software they'd like to have. And not with another abstract discussion about a 2030 digital strategy.
But with a much simpler question:
Which process in your company annoys you, every single day?
Because we already talk about digitalization enough
The numbers show this is already an economically relevant topic. According to Bitkom, 73 percent of companies say the German economy has already lost market share due to slow digitalization. At the same time, 20 percent of companies still work in a largely paper-based way. Only 39 percent work mostly paperless.
Here's the interesting part: many companies aren't actually short on digital tools. ERP, CRM, document management, collaboration tools, Excel, email. The systems are there.
And yet, in projects, we keep seeing workflows that have built their own parallel world.
There's an established system for purchase planning, but procurement keeps running its own spreadsheets in parallel because it doesn't fully trust the system's suggestions.
Or five departments work on the same service case, but the handoff runs between email, Excel, phone calls, and several legacy ERP systems.
These aren't theoretical examples. We run into exactly these situations in our work.
The most interesting processes never show up on a process diagram
So when we come into a company, one very simple question interests us fairly early on:
How does this actually work here?
Not how the process was defined at some point. But how it runs on a Monday morning, when three orders come in at once, someone is out sick, and a piece of information is missing from the ERP.
That's when it gets interesting.
Workarounds are rarely dumb. Most of the time, they're actually pretty clever.
At some point someone had a problem and needed a quick fix. So a spreadsheet was born. Later a second legal entity joined. An additional approval step became necessary. A new ERP was introduced. A colleague built themselves a helper list.
Every single decision may have been completely reasonable on its own. It's just that at some point, nobody looked at the whole construct anymore.
And suddenly the file is called customerlist_final_new_v8_final.xlsx.
That's roughly the moment we start paying close attention.
Why exactly these problems get us fired up
Maybe this also explains fairly well why Sascha and I started a software company together in the first place.
We like problems. More precisely: we like problems that can actually be solved.
Sascha started programming as a kid on his C64. For me, it was a QBasic demo game with two monkeys throwing exploding bananas at each other. Back then, I changed the code so the bananas would fly faster. Not exactly business-critical. The underlying principle has stayed remarkably similar ever since.
Something isn't working the way it should? Then we want to understand why.
We gave ourselves the freedom to work on the topics that genuinely grab us. And over the last few years it's become pretty clear which ones those are.
Processes where we already start sketching arrows on a whiteboard during the first conversation. Workflows where five systems are involved and someone still maintains a spreadsheet on the side. Situations where we eventually look at each other and say: this has to be simpler somehow.
These are exactly the topics that get us fired up.
I tend to look first at the bigger picture, the process as a whole, and where the actual root cause sits. Sascha has the drive to dig in technically until it's clear how to genuinely build something better. Our roles aren't rigid, but this combination works pretty well.
Maybe that's also why process digitalization in the SME sector appeals to us so much. That's where decades of grown workflows meet new requirements, standard software meets individual reality, and pragmatic stopgaps meet the wish to finally clean things up.
For us, that's exactly the kind of problem we founded vensas for.
So now we're building a Wall of Shame
The name sounds a bit more dramatic than we actually mean it.
We don't want to call anyone out. Quite the opposite: we suspect a lot of companies have their own version of these stories. And we want to know which ones.
That's why employees and companies can submit their historically grown process to "Germany's Weirdest Process." We publish selected cases anonymously on our Wall of Shame. The company name stays out of it.
Maybe it's a customer list maintained three times over. Maybe it's a vacation request that's filled out digitally, printed, signed, and then scanned back in. Or a production process where the actual control system consists of ERP, Excel, and one person's tribal knowledge.
We're genuinely interested in this reality.
Not because we want to make fun of it. But because it says a lot about where digitalization is actually needed in everyday business.
Of course, this is also customer discovery for us
We could sit down at vensas and think about which software we believe the German SME sector needs. We could analyze trends, compare competitors, and derive new product ideas from our past projects.
We find reality more interesting.
Which processes actually cost companies time? Where do daily manual loops keep appearing? Which problems keep showing up across completely different companies? Where do existing standard solutions fall short? And which problems are relevant enough that people genuinely want to change something about them?
That's exactly why this campaign is also a big customer discovery exercise for us.
An extra spreadsheet next to an existing system, for example, isn't a sign to us that employees are refusing digitalization. It's a signal. It shows that the real process needs something the existing solution isn't currently delivering.
We want to understand these patterns better.
And if, by the end of the campaign, we've not only improved one weird process but also have a clearer picture of where SMEs genuinely need support today, then the experiment worked for us.
And then we turn a weird process into a better one
Just collecting submissions wouldn't be enough for us.
That's why we review every submission and select five processes where we see particularly strong potential. Among other things, process relevance, automation potential, and how widespread the pattern is all matter.
These five go into a community vote from November 3 to 16.
And then it gets serious for us.
For the winner, we build a first custom-tailored software solution, roughly five development days in scope, worth €10,000.
Our goal: turning a "that's just how we've always done it" into a "why did we actually do it that way for so long?"
Maybe your process is exactly the one
Maybe that's also why "Germany's Weirdest Process" is pretty typical of us.
We built vensas so we could work on problems that genuinely interest us. And by now we know fairly precisely which ones those are: processes where we can see unnecessary time being lost. Workflows that only keep working because people compensate for their weaknesses every day with experience, extra lists, and improvisation. Systems where, after five minutes, you automatically start thinking about how to put them together more sensibly.
We want to look at the places in everyday work where nobody asks anymore why something works the way it does.
Why does this approval need five stops? Why is the same piece of information entered three times? Why does only one person know which file is the right one? And does it really have to be this complicated?
These are exactly the processes we're looking for.
Maybe one of them is sitting somewhere in your company right now. In a spreadsheet. In a folder being passed around. Or in the head of exactly one person.
Then show it to us.
Submissions are open until October 25, 2026. Describing your process takes about five minutes. Small and medium-sized companies based in Germany can take part.