Establishing the best possible worldwide service

04.01.2017

The Arburg international service meeting was hosted at the company headquarters in Lossburg on 6 and 7 December 2016. This brought together the service specialists from the company's worldwide subsidiaries and, for the first time, from the international trading partners, providing an opportunity to network and exchange ideas.

On the agenda was information on the latest market developments, important technical service-related issues and the current range of technological.

The international service meeting in 2016 was the seventh occasion on which Arburg's service organisation had met in an information exercise and in order to further improve its worldwide services. Eckhard Witte, Service divisional manager at Arburg, welcomed the 45 participants from 32 different counties, who also included specialists from Arburg's trading partners for the first time. He said that the main point during the event, which included interesting presentations on service-related topics, was for the participants to get to know one another through discussions and to build up a service network that lives and breathes through mutual regional and international interaction. He believed that this is the only way to establish and develop uniformly high-quality and efficient service for all Arburg customers.

Service places the focus on the customer

Gerhard Böhm welcomed the international guests in his capacity as Managing Director Sales. Taking the new Arburg brand promise "Wir sind da." as a starting point, he spoke about service as a central element in the company's customer support activities. He believed that service was much more than just an added benefit, but also an important driving force behind customer satisfaction. Moreover, these services were also relevant as a unique selling point in the context of otherwise largely comparable technology, enabling Arburg to beat off the competition. In this context, the human factor was of major importance, since training and experience were the key differentiators in resolving customer-specific problems. The growing significance of Industry 4.0 and increasingly networked technology was also a factor for the future that had huge potential in service. Here it was vital that help should be provided as quickly and comprehensively as possible, so that customers' production runs smoothly.

New mobile service system

In addition to comprehensive service-specific information on machines, peripherals and processes, as well as tours of the company that underlined the high level of integration in production at Arburg, the presentation of a new mobile service system marked a further focus on a more rational process in service. The mobile service system was piloted in depth in Poland and Switzerland in 2016 before it is rolled out in all subsidiaries on the basis of SAP in 2017. In a laptop-based approach, the software will enable the service technicians to coordinate more effectively, so that the work units can provide fast feedback and the work carried out for customers can be documented precisely.

As an addendum to the international service meeting, special training courses were also offered for service employees from Asia in particular, thus ensuring they made the best use of their time at Arburg. The positive feedback from the participants is proof that the international service meeting succeeded in promoting networking in this vital sector. This made it possible to develop and further consolidate the exchange of information within the most important regions of the world.