Selling to Siemens

In fiscal 2025, ended 30 September 2025, Siemens generated revenue of 78.9 billion euros and net income of 10.4 billion euros, and employed around 318,000 people worldwide on the basis of continuing operations. Research and development expenditures reached 6.6 billion euros, some 53,200 employees worked in research departments, and they created 5,300 inventions and filed 2,600 patent applications.

Those numbers attract vendors. Here is the one that decides whether you have a business here: Siemens is not only a buyer of enterprise software, it is one of the largest sellers of it. Siemens says Digital Industries is number one in industrial software and automation, that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies use its software, and that 33 percent of machines worldwide run on a Siemens controller. The Xcelerator portfolio includes Teamcenter, NX, Simcenter and Mendix, and Siemens closed the Altair Engineering acquisition in March 2025 at an enterprise value of approximately 10 billion US dollars and completed the Dotmatics acquisition in July 2025.

So Siemens is three things at once for most software sellers: a possible customer, a direct competitor, and a distribution channel. Work out which one you are proposing before you write anything.

How the buying process actually runs

The strategic procurement platform is SCM STAR, and it is not SAP Ariba. Siemens runs Source to Contract on SCM STAR, hosted on Jaggaer, and the published terms of use state that access to and use of the portal are restricted to invited and registered suppliers. Unlike the self-registration portals many large buyers run, this front door opens from the inside.

The operational side is separate again. Purchase to Pay runs from purchase order to invoice receipt, Electronic Supplier Integration, which Siemens calls ESI+, handles electronic data exchange, and sourcing events may run through Keelvar or SCM CART. Siemens also states that some business units use its PLM software Teamcenter for supplier management, so you may be onboarded through a product Siemens itself sells.

Compliance obligations are German and American at once. Siemens publishes a Code of Conduct for Suppliers, and its Supervisory Board has tracked implementation of the German Supply Chain Act, the Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz. Siemens USA separately maintains its own Terms and Conditions, including a Statement of Affirmative Action and a Supplier Subcontracting Program with Tier 2 reporting. Which applies depends on which entity signs.

The group is not one buyer. Digital Industries, Smart Infrastructure and Mobility are distinct businesses, alongside Siemens Advanta and the service units Financial Services, Global Business Services and Siemens Real Estate. Siemens Healthineers is separately listed with its own management board, supervisory board and works council, and Siemens Energy is a separate listed company with its own supplier portal. Winning in one tells you little about the others.

Who owns what, so you know where your deal belongs

You will not be selling to these people. Their remits tell you which part of the group your deal sits in, and whose priorities it must survive further down.

Notice two things. Siemens publishes functional titles only for the chief executive and chief financial officer and describes the rest simply as members of the Managing Board, so remits are harder to read from outside than at a comparable American company. And the board is shrinking: Matthias Rebellius remains a member until his term ends on 30 September 2026, and with his departure and that of Ralf P. Thomas the board reduces from seven members to five. Supply Chain Management is headed by Chief Procurement Officer Klaus Staubitzer.

Names and roles taken from Siemens' own leadership, governance and supply chain pages and press releases, verified 11 September 2026. Senior roles change. Verify at source before using any name.

Why you cannot sell to Siemens from the bottom

A company spending 6.6 billion euros a year on research and development, with 53,200 people in research roles and its own industrial software business, has an internal answer to most problems in engineering, simulation, lifecycle, data and AI. The objection is rarely that your product is bad. It is that an internal owner already has a roadmap item that looks adjacent, and that owner is usually in a room you have never been in.

The industrial reality adds a second gate. Deals here touch factories, controllers, machine safety cases and installed operational technology with lifespans measured in decades. A plant manager cannot change a validated line on the strength of a demo, and a corporate function cannot impose one without the site.

The layer that matters sits below the published names

With the Managing Board reducing to five, almost nobody with real budget authority over your category is named on the leadership page. Sponsors are business unit heads, plant digitalisation leads, domain architects, Xcelerator platform owners and procurement category managers.

That layer is hard to map here. Research and development alone runs across more than 150 sites, concentrated in Germany, Austria, the United States, China, Portugal and India. The ONE Tech Company programme is actively moving remits between businesses, so an org chart six months old misleads, and the Healthineers separation is rewriting some relationships right now. Working out the real buying committee and reaching more than one of them is the whole job. Multithreading is not optional.

The Supervisory Board is a published second-degree map

Siemens AG is a German stock corporation with two boards, not one. The Managing Board runs the business, the Supervisory Board appoints and monitors it, and nobody sits on both, so a pitch aimed at the board in the American sense is aimed at nothing in particular. The Supervisory Board has 20 members, and as stipulated by the German Co-determination Act half represent shareholders and half represent employees. It runs six standing committees, and in September 2025 it decided to reorient and rename one: the Innovation and Finance Committee became the Innovation and Technology Committee from 1 October 2025, explicitly because of technology's strategic relevance.

The shareholder side reads as a network map:

• Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman since 2013, formerly co chief executive officer of SAP.
• Dr. Ulf Mark Schneider, formerly chief executive officer of Nestle, whom the Supervisory Board intends to elect Chairman immediately after the Annual Shareholders' Meeting on 11 February 2027.
• Dr. Regina E. Dugan, currently President and Chief Executive Officer of Wellcome Leap.
• Keryn Lee James, currently Chair of the Board of OPUS Talent Solutions and of Lane Clark and Peacock, and Senior Advisor with Bain Capital Management Europe.
• Grazia Vittadini, currently Chief Technology Officer and Executive Board member of Deutsche Lufthansa.
• Matthias Zachert, currently Chairman of the Board of Management of LANXESS.
• Benoit Potier, currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of L'Air Liquide.
• Dr. Werner Brandt, Second Deputy Chairman, with Kasper Rorsted and Dr. Nathalie von Siemens, both described by Siemens as members of supervisory boards.

The succession plan published in May 2026 matters for any two year account plan. Snabe, Nathalie von Siemens and Potier leave at the end of the 2027 Annual Shareholders' Meeting. Ola Rollen, former chief executive of Hexagon, Marion Helmes, Chairwoman of the Audit Committee of Siemens Healthineers, and Christoph von Seidel, a member of the Siemens family, are proposed as new members.

The employee half is not decoration. It includes Jürgen Kerner, First Deputy Chairman and Second Chairman of IG Metall, Tobias Bäumler, Chairman of the Central Works Council of Siemens AG, and Mimon Uhamou, Chairman of the Siemens Europe Committee. If your product touches employee data, monitoring or headcount, works council consultation is a real stage of the sale.

One name is worth getting right. Prof. Dr. Ralf P. Thomas is the former Chief Financial Officer of Siemens AG. Bienert took the role on 1 April 2026, Thomas left the Managing Board at the end of 13 May 2026, and serves as special advisor until the end of his regular term in December 2026. He does remain Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Siemens Healthineers AG. Calling him the CFO today tells a Siemens buyer your research is stale.

Other routes in

The partner ecosystem. Siemens Xcelerator is an open platform with a certified partner network and a marketplace. For many vendors the realistic first deal is not a procurement contract, it is a partner listing, and that route runs through Digital Industries, not Supply Chain Management.

Siemens Advanta and N47. Advanta is the group's own consulting and integration arm, sitting inside the account and able to route you to the team with the problem. N47, established in 2016 as Next47 for Siemens' venture capital activities, is a second, under used path.

Acquired company alumni. Siemens has absorbed Mentor Graphics, Mendix, Altair and Dotmatics among many others. It does not publish a formal corporate alumni network, so do not plan around one. People who joined through those acquisitions, and those who have since left, are the equivalent pool.

Your industrial customers. Senior manufacturing and engineering leadership is a small world, and a champion who has watched your product survive a plant floor beats anyone on your payroll. Finding which path already exists inside your own company is what relationship intelligence is for. At 318,000 people, one almost certainly exists and nobody has looked.

And then you have to get to your own connector

This step kills more introductions than the external ask. Suppose the best route runs through one of your own directors who sits on a board with someone in that Lufthansa, LANXESS, Air Liquide or Hexagon orbit. That is close to unrepeatable. You have to get that person to prioritise it, write something credible in their own voice, and spend a piece of a relationship built over years. Ask badly twice and you will not be asked again.

Three rules for the introduction itself

Ask for the business, not for Siemens. "An introduction to whoever owns factory data platforms in Digital Industries" is actionable. "An introduction to Siemens" is not.

Say whether you are a partner or a competitor. It is the first question anyone internal will ask, and an introduction that does not answer it stalls at the first forward. Write the answer into the blurb your connector will send. The forwardable blurb is the whole craft.

A warm path starts the clock, it does not skip it. You still need an SCM STAR invitation, supplier qualification, the Code of Conduct, cybersecurity review and, where relevant, works council consultation. What it buys is a real conversation with someone who has a problem and a budget, months earlier.

See the warm paths into Siemens

Everything above describes the problem: a company that may onboard you through software it sells. What it does not tell you is which of your own relationships already reaches inside. That is a question about your network, not theirs, and it is the one most teams answer from memory.

Boomerang maps the warm paths your company already has into accounts like Siemens, across your team, your customers, your board and investors, and your partners. It then drafts the ask, routes it through the right connector and tracks it to a booked meeting. Book a 15-minute walkthrough and see it run against your own target accounts.