Gruenbeck

Spare parts ordering reorganised thanks to CATALOGcreator®.

Gruenbeck is a leading supplier of individual solutions for water treatment. Thanks to the CATALOGcreator® software solution, the company is automating the creation process of its spare parts catalogues for over 2,000 products in the field of domestic and swimming pool technology. This not only saves a lot of time, but also offers users of the new 2D online catalogue many additional advantages in quickly identifying and ordering the parts they need.

Company

Gruenbeck is a competent partner for water treatment, drinking water, service water and waste water. The company, headquartered in Höchstädt an der Donau, offers solutions for building services, beverage production, power plants and other industries. The group of companies employs over 800 people at 25 locations in Germany and is present in all important markets worldwide.

Initial situation

Gruenbeck has been using spare parts catalogues since 1997. Originally, these were a manageable number of spare parts lists. These were created manually in Excel and Word and converted into a PDF file to enable all users to open the documents with Acrobat Reader. When changes were made, this procedure required a lot of time, as the documents had to be adapted and re-converted to PDF and made available. In the early years, there was an additional paper edition that comprised three Leitz folders. Before the introduction of an electronic solution for spare parts catalogues, the texts were created in Word and the 2D drawings were reworked with CorelDraw. The table of contents of the PDF catalogue then contained links to the corresponding texts and drawings. The entire catalogue was stored on an internal drive. For the partners, a copy of the catalogue was made on a separate drive with external access.

Requirements

By 2010, the number of products had already risen to over 1,200. And continues to increase from year to year. However, the original way of working had not fundamentally changed since 1997. Bernd Güntner, the project manager on Grünbeck's side, formulates the situation at that time as follows: "It was as if we continued to work with "hammer and chisel on stone tablets". We manufacture very innovative products, but our spare parts catalogue was at a "stone age" level. We wanted to change this as quickly as possible."

A project team from Gruenbeck visited the Technical Documentation Conference (tekom) to find out about the possibilities offered by an electronic spare parts catalogue and to make initial contacts with suppliers. In the subsequent selection process, the decision was made in favour of TID Informatik as well as CATALOGcreator®. "Our main reasons for working with TID were: simple licensing model, a user-friendly and innovative software solution as well as a transparent overall concept for the costs of the project", explains Bernd Guentner. The main goal of introducing electronic spare parts catalogue software was to establish a fully automated process for creating the catalogues. It was also important to map a role-based user concept in the new software solution. So that different internal and external user groups should have access to the online catalogue.

"Our main reasons for working with TID were: simple licensing model, a user-friendly and innovative software solution as well as a transparent overall concept for the costs of the project."
Bernd Guentner (Project Manager Gruenbeck )

Solution

Today, all data of the spare parts lists as well as the drawings and photos are entered into Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) and then exported fully automatically into CATALOGcreator®. This means a considerable reduction in workload. The provision of the data in the catalogue - easily retrievable via a browser - and the integrated search functions guarantee fast and accurate identification of the spare parts sought by customers and internal users.

An authorisation concept that manages different access rights ensures that each user group is only shown the information in the catalogue that has been defined accordingly beforehand. In the course of the project, the symbols for the articles were also optimised and the search functions expanded. The catalogue is used internally by the service department, the technicians and the customer distribution network. Currently, the distribution works with the online catalogue, in which the right parts can be quickly identified via a graphical navigation or the comfortable search and then ordered by e-mail. An offline version of the catalogue to support the field staff is one of the next project goals.

Experience and outlook

In 2016, more than 1,000 spare parts lists are already being maintained in CATALOGcreator®. These are from the area of building services. The complete catalogue for building services and swimming pool technology will soon be available online. The catalogue also contains further information such as photos or installation instructions. As well as a usage list showing where the identified part is still installed. For the future, there are further ideas to optimise the use of the spare parts catalogue. The focus is on the realisation of additional requirements from the customer service area. Furthermore, there are considerations to work with compressed 3D models in the catalogue in the future. Gruenbeck is also planning to integrate additional information such as plant construction into the catalogue. Thus, the use of the existing spare parts catalogue solution is developing more and more in the direction of a service portal that also includes information from other data sources in the electronic spare parts catalogue software.

Conclusion from Gruenbeck

"We like the entire structure of CATALOGcreator® as well as the transparent price model of TID extremely well. The flexibility and the individual design options of this software are inspiring and leave us plenty of scope for new ideas. An intuitive user interface and easy handling are essential advantages to promote the acceptance of the users of such a catalogue. Last but not least, the cooperation with TID also worked very well", summarises the project manager on Gruenbeck 's side.