At AAH Apparatebau A. Hofheinz GmbH in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany, Online Support from SEW-EURODRIVE helps to dramatically reduce the workload. AAH Managing Director, Ralf Stuppert, is particularly enthusiastic about using the variant management function.
Further information on AAH:
For AAH, quick response times and rapid offer and order processing give them a significant advantage over the competition. The requirements for suppliers therefore include the following:
The customer platform Online Support, which is integrated into the SEW-EURODRIVE website, supports the customer throughout the entire life cycle of its products. Many areas are open and accessible to the user without any registration. Only the areas that contain customer-sensitive data have restricted access.
A number of helpful functions – that is particularly comprehensive compared to the rest of the market – provide support for customer processes:
Advantages of the variant management:
Online Support and the variant management in particular make work a great deal easier for AAH:
In Online Support, I mainly use the variant management function. That makes my work much, much easier.
I know what nominal power and what revolutions I need for my agitator. In the variant management, I can see at a glance which items I have ordered in the past, and I can change the specifications if necessary. I then place the relevant product with my item number in the shopping cart, so that my net price is displayed, and that's it!
As you can see, the variant management makes my purchasing much easier and more transparent. The wide range of filter options is also brilliant, because it's difficult to search for the right products in your own article master.
In this way, an ordering procedure rarely takes me longer than a minute.
Founded in the millennium year 2000 as a sole proprietorship by Arnold Hofheinz, AAH Apparatebau now has eight employees. Even long before the founding of the company, the founder had begun to focus on pumps and agitators for the chemical industry and for electroplating and process engineering. Nowadays, he can look back on over 30 years of experience in the industry and in the production of rotary and submersible pumps, rapid and gear unit mixers, containers, and lifting equipment. An immense wealth of knowledge that he passed on to his son-in-law, the current Managing Director, Ralf Stuppert.
Mr Stuppert names rapid response times and quick offer and order processing as particularly important competitive edges. Bearing this in mind, the company has developed particularly successfully in recent years. In fact, Mr Stuppert never needs to worry about a lack of requests. Most of the orders come from the recommendations of satisfied customers.
Initially, there was a fear that drives from SEW-EURODRIVE would be too expensive, and this was one of the reasons why AAH did not use gearmotors from our company at the outset.
However, speed in the response times and in delivery is one of the most important premises at AAH in the relations with their own customers. As the cooperation with a different drive manufacturer became problematic because of excessively long delivery times, SEW-EURODRIVE appeared on the shortlist of possible replacements.
The initial quotations quickly revealed that the SEW-EURODRIVE pricing was extremely attractive compared to other drive technology companies. This point combined with reliable delivery times were the deciding factors: Since 2012, AAH has purchased almost all its required gearmotors in the power range of 0.18 to 15 kilowatts from us.
In the end, our Online Support customer platform completely convinced the Managing Director, Mr Stuppert, who is conscious of the value of online services. All of his orders have been processed exclusively via the service since 2015, and he is usually able to entirely process an order in less than one minute. A process and a speed that completely revolutionized everyday purchasing at AAH and provide huge time savings.
Mr Stuppert is particularly thrilled with the variant management function in the Online Support. He is especially impressed with the wide range of filter options that are available to him. After all, it can be difficult and time-intensive to search for the right products in the company's own article master. If it so happens that he cannot find anything suitable, he simply uses the SEW-EURODRIVE product configurator and selects a new product from there.
In the daily work at AAH, the SEW-EURODRIVE variant management has virtually become a type of "extended workbench": On the one hand, the tool helps with the selection of suitable SEW-EURODRIVE products and with the preparation of offers for end customers, including all the available data sheets. On the other hand, it also helps to reduce product variance,
because it displays products that have already been requested or ordered in the past in the variant management database. Supported by extensive filter and comparison options with product criteria such as motor power, output speed, and output torque, it is extremely easy for Ralf Stuppert to select a suitable new drive from the list of already used ones.
This offers the advantage that he can manage the reduction of variance in this way, even during the selection process. In addition, time-consuming searches through the company's own article master are now also a thing of the past at AAH.
