The Team Behind the Software

Our focus: making complexity manageable. Planning production and supply chains so that they work in reality – not just in theory.
Our AI-powered solutions connect demand, production, and business planning into an integrated system. Modular, scalable, and usable in real time.
At the core is the OMMM algorithm – developed on the basis of the MLCLSP model and backed by over 25 years of research and more than 10,000 development days. From research to application. From planning to control.
Instead of isolated optimization of individual bottlenecks, we look at the entire value chain. The result: less waste, more stability, better decisions.
For companies that don’t just want to manage their production, but actively control it.

The OMMM Story

Prologue

A city in the west of Germany, 2017. In the halls of a well-known confectionery brand manufacturer, the air smells of boiling fruit and chocolate – and in the planning offices, of stress. 700 million euros in revenue and 2,000 employees need to be coordinated. The screens display an expensive SAP landscape that suggests complete control. The actual planning runs on the monitors next to it: a fragile network of homemade Excel spreadsheets. Three-shift operations, six planners per shift. Eighteen people in total – the classic old guard of industry. Using pure experience and intuition, they try to manually tame this infinite complexity. One of them is flying on vacation next week – with his company laptop in his carry-on. He has to be prepared to intervene from abroad.

The phone rings: a top customer is demanding 40 tonnes of a special batch on short notice. The beginning of a chain reaction: raw materials run out, other major orders fall out of the plan, delivery deadlines collapse. The system is burning in real time.

Something needs to change. This is not a management problem. It is a mathematical problem of absurd dimensions: there are theoretically 10 to the power of 5,809 possibilities for achieving optimal planning in this production setup. A number that exceeds all human imagination and every conventional spreadsheet. Actually a perfect use case for artificial intelligence.

A head-to-head comparison is meant to bring clarity. For the less complex B2C segment, the SAP standard solution of a third-party provider is tested. For the highly complex industrial bulk containers, a radical approach is taken: Horst Tempelmeier, an academic authority on mathematical optimization and heuristics from the University of Cologne, is brought on board. His team develops the algorithms not in an ivory tower, but directly on the factory floor – together with the 18 planners on-site. It is the Ferry Porsche approach: they simply build the tool themselves, because what they needed didn’t exist on the market. Two years later, the numbers are on the table: the project with the third-party SAP standard solution is shut down – it unlocks no potential. The proprietary algorithmic solution, by contrast, runs flawlessly, orchestrates the complex processes without interference, and reliably saves the plant 1.2 million euros per year. At a single location.

“OMMM – the real thing. For the planners, by the planners.”
– Holger Schlenger, former CIO of Eckes-Granini and Valeo Foods Group

Those involved realize: if this mathematical logic can be translated into industrial standard software, they hold the key to the future of industry in their hands. At the end of 2019, they found OMMM to bring peace of mind to the planning departments of industry. The beginning of a great success story.

Scaling Up

The starting shot is fired through classic bootstrapping, driven by a clear mission: to make industrial sites sustainably competitive and to consistently eliminate resource waste. OMMM set out to optimize complex production processes and fundamentally revolutionize supply chain planning through AI-powered optimization. Early customer successes with confectionery manufacturer Schluckwerder immediately prove this leverage. But the day-to-day learning curve is painful; poor data quality and rigid IT structures initially block the rollout. It also becomes clear: every company has a different level of digital maturity. Radical full automation is not immediately feasible or sensible everywhere. OMMM responds with purpose, adapts its product portfolio, and develops low-threshold entry-level products.

“We meet companies where they are and take their planning step by step to the next level.”
– Reinhard Vanhöfen, Co-Founder and CEO, OMMM

The goal remains unchanged: peace of mind for planners and all involved functions – and a real, measurable competitive advantage for the entire company. At the end of 2023, a strategic turning point follows: Reinhard Vanhöfen takes over full-time as CEO for operational leadership – together with Dr. Gabriele Reith-Ahlemeier as CTO/COO, the long-standing right hand of Horst Tempelmeier, and Norbert Weichele as Executive Board Member and Chairman. In the late summer of 2025, the next logical milestone on the growth path follows: the German AI software provider successfully closes its seed financing round of approximately 3.6 million euros. The tech venture capitalists from neoteq ventures in Cologne and NRW.BANK from Düsseldorf join as lead investors, with the operational founding team also participating. OMMM reports that it is already profitable at this early stage. With the fresh capital, OMMM completely restructures the company in January 2026. The team is selectively expanded – above all in the core areas of software development and implementation.

“With us, specialists become 18 missionaries. We bring more courage and more speed to industry and inspire companies to finally dare more.”
– Dr. Gabriele Reith-Ahlemeier, CTO/COO, OMMM

At the heart of this drive is the Fast Lane concept: OMMM takes factories from Excel chaos to automated production planning in just 12 weeks. In demand planning, it takes as little as four to six weeks. A new benchmark in the market.

The Roadmap

The next step leads to the company’s own headquarters in Cologne. OMMM is heading towards 30 employees and reaching one million euros in ARR. The goal is undisputed market leadership in the food industry – from confectionery and dairy products to the meat and beverage industry – closely followed by the development of further verticals in the process industry such as pharma, chemicals, cosmetics, and building materials. In the middle of the seventh year of overall economic stagnation, rising energy costs, volatile raw material prices, and the shortage of skilled workers are not unsolvable crises for us – they are mathematical optimization problems.

“We are and will remain at the pulse of the times. What we do will become increasingly important for the survival of industrial sites.”
– Norbert Weichele, Co-Founder and Executive Board Member, OMMM

Provided that the economy dares to take new paths – and no longer relies solely on the supposedly safe standard answers and add-ons from Walldorf. Our roadmap translates these uncertainties into cloud-based architectures, LLM integrations, and autonomous AI assistance systems. This is how we make the future of the process industry precisely calculable. For maximum predictability and absolute reliability.