MILESTONE #12

Workforce increase and spatial expansion

Corporate Growth

Since we entered the automotive market in 1999 with DiagRA® D, RA Consulting has achieved impressive growth. This success is due to our strategic focus on diagnostic software for vehicle control units and the expansion of our portfolio to include tools and services for measuring, calibration, and testing. Both, our employee count and facility size have grown steadily and sustainably. In the last 10 years alone, our number of employees has doubled.

Our team

We are particularly proud of the diversity of our workforce: the 80 RA employees currently working at our headquarters in Bruchsal come from 20 different nations, creating an open, multicultural and highly professional working environment. Particularly noteworthy is the high proportion of female software developers, programmers and IT administrators. At 32%, the proportion of women at RA Consulting is twice as high as the industry average for IT companies.

The growth of RA Consulting in terms of both personnel and space resulted from the successful diversification of the product range and the development of new international markets. While the company has been working with national resellers in many European countries for a long time, RA established a branch in China in 2012 and a subsidiary in the USA in 2016. This growth was made possible not least by our lean and highly effective central teams in the areas of IT administration, marketing and media, UI/UX, human resources and finance, which form the strong backbone of our organization with their daily work.

Spatial expansion

The strong growth in the number of employees has always gone hand in hand with the need for new office space: the first RA Consulting building was created with the founding of the Technology Village (TED) in Bruchsal at the beginning of 2000. Just five years later, in 2005, the first floors of RA II were opened, which still offers space for around 50 employees as well as rooms for training. RA III, another modern building with up to 50 workplaces in a sustainable, future-oriented design, is currently being built as an extension to the TED Bruchsal location. “Our goal with the new company building is to create a combination of quiet, ergonomic workplaces for focused work, as well as communal areas for communication, collaboration and new ways of working, tailored to the needs of our employees and organization,” says Hannah Rupalla, who is leading the construction project on the RA Consulting side.

Our strategy

Since its foundation in 1989, RA Consulting has also faced a variety of challenges. The major political, social and economic changes included German reunification, but also the development of electric mobility and, currently, highly-automated driving. Topics such as internationalisation, digitisation and AI have also been the focus of RA for a long time.

Our founder and General Manager Armin Rupalla sums it up:

”I am very pleased that we as a team have always managed to successfully adapt RA Consulting’s corporate strategy to changing requirements and circumstances. Through our shareholdings, a good network and involvement in R&D projects, we have also been able to drive forward numerous innovations.

For this, a big THANK YOU to everyone who has led, accompanied and supported RA Consulting over the past 35 years.”