Goldhofer

The specialist for difficult transports

Goldhofer is a leading developer and manufacturer of specialized vehicles such as trailers, semi-trailers, self-propelled modular vehicles, aircraft tractors and aircraft recovery systems. CATALOGcreator® fully automaticly generates individual spare parts catalogs for each vehicle for service purposes.

Goldhofer worldwide

With its wide range of products Goldhofer covers the most various requirements for any transport task. Renowned worldwide, Goldhofer proves its solution competency by solving difficult problems involving combined road, rail, maritime and air transports. Goldhofer is a specialist as far as general road, heavy goods and special transports are concerned. On their premises in Memmingen, measuring approx. 100,000 m², some 600 employees build vehicles with loading capacities ranging from 25 to 10,000 tons.

Starting point

The spare parts catalogs were created semi-automatically and predominantly delivered on paper. Optionally a CD could be generated with a self-programmed, interactive spare parts catalog. Disadvantage of this solution was that the drawings were not linked to the BOM.

In total Goldhofer published approximately 1,500 catalogs per year with about 50 to 100 modules and 3,000 to 5,000 spare parts.

Requirements

The manual efforts at rebuilding and modification of catalogs should be omitted. All media – print, online and offline – should be generated from one data source by pressing a button. The interactive connection of the graphs with the BOMs was a key demand of the users.

A very important new feature for Goldhofer was the fact that the catalogs will also be published online via intranet and internet. The spare parts should be easy to find and inquiries and orders completed online. Since it was not clear what the user acceptance would be, the project also focused strongly on the PDF - catalogs.

Solution

From the Navision ERP system vehicle-specific parts lists are obtained, and from the Windchill PLM system the relevant drawings with a reference list. The hot spotting of the vector graphics is fully automatic.

The CATALOGcreator® monitors a "watch folder" and creates from the parts lists contained therein the catalogs in an automated process. For the customer a login is generated through which he can access the catalogs of his vehicles.

Contrary to initial concerns the online catalogs were accepted by the users with great enthusiasm.  Mainly contributing to this fact are the timeliness of the catalogs and the direct ordering. Therefore Goldhofer now only produces catalogs on CD and paper in exceptional cases.

Conclusion

At Goldhofer’s the technical documentation, spare parts sales and service engineers primarily benefit from the introduction of CATALOGcreator®. In sales the spare parts catalog is used as a selling point.

Particularly noteworthy aspects:

• The catalog creation process is fully automatic
• The up-to-dateness of the catalogs has increased significantly
• The handling of the catalogs has improved significantly
• The priority is now on the online catalogs

Outlook

The next step at Goldhofer is the update of the new software generation of TID Informatik, CATALOGcreator 2015. In future, Goldhofer wants to deploy 3D catalogs based on XVL of Lattice Technology.

The medium-term plan is to introduce CATALOGcreator® at the subsidiary Schopf in Ostfildern as well.
 

„With TID Informatik we have found a partner that fits Goldhofer to a tee. Innovative, yet down to earth and always one step ahead of the competition. It is an extremely trusting and cooperative collaboration. TID understands our concerns, tasks are accepted enthusiastically and any problems are eliminated quickly. 

True to the Goldhofer philosophy: We find solutions!“

Horst Wetzel, Head of Technical Documentation, Goldhofer Aktiengesellschaft