ottobock.

Quality for Life

Otto Bock HealthCare is a modern, success-oriented Medtech company with tradition. Being a leading Orthobionic® company with core competencies focusing on developments in the field of prosthesis and orthosis systems, Bionicmobility® comprises a further competence field of Otto Bock. It offers, for one, Mobility Solutions such as high quality light weight and active wheelchairs, electric wheelchairs, but also products for children’s rehabilitation and seating aid systems.

The spare parts catalogs used to be created manually, taking up a lot of time and effort and, as a result, were only up-to-date at the time of their creation. Dealing with the variety of variants and languages proved to be very difficult and could only be accomplished with great efforts. The introduction of a modern electronic spare parts catalog system was to create a consistent database for worldwide use.

Family business in third generation

Continuity is a mainstay for Otto Bock’s road to success. Since 1990, the family business has been run by Prof. Hans Georg Näder, the third generation of entrepreneurs. Worldwide, the name of Otto Bock stands for high-quality and technologically outstanding products and services in Orthobionic® and Bionicmobility®.  It is Otto Bock’s aim to improve the quality of life of the disabled: In prosthetics this means that missing body parts are being replaced by, if possible, functional prostheses. At the same time, orthoses support permanently or temporarily impaired bodily functions, either therapeutically or prophylactically.

Worldwide, Otto Bock has 44 subsidiaries and 4,300 employees whilst ranking among the top 100 companies among Germany’s medium-sized businesses for many years.

Initial situation

The construction department supplied the documentation department with excel-lists. They produced manually printed catalogs, which were delivered on paper. These paper catalogs were usually only up-to-date for a short period of time, amendments required for the various countries and markets were difficult and extremely time-consuming.

Requirements

Service technicians, dealers and customers expect from Otto Bock spare parts catalogs that are easy and intuitively to handle allowing quick and obvious identification of spare parts and variants. It is important that a database can be used to generate catalogs for various media such as paper, CD and internet.

Monthly and fully automatic catalog updates, straight from SAP, reduce the time and effort involved in creating and maintaining the catalogs to a minimum.

Solution

The spare parts catalog is based on a complete parts list in SAP. Using SAP – material numbers all important information such as prices, graphics, translations etc. are available. The graphics are produced in Adobe Illustrator and saved as a web standard – in SVGZ format.

The online – catalog is connected via an OCI (Open Catalog Interface) to the SAP – Webshop. As a result, having selected the spare parts to be ordered, orders are automatically created and availability checked in SAP.

Conclusion

Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH only uses the standard CATALOGcreator® software. No additional programming was required. Using CATALOGcreator® resulted in the following:

• The catalog creation process is fully automatic.
• Up-to-dateness of the catalogs increased significantly
• Identification of spare parts has become considerably easy
• Processing time involved in creating and delivering the order has been reduced to a large extent.
• The complex variants system has been completely visualised in the catalog.

“Using TID, we have meanwhile implemented two projects: the introduction of CATALOGcreator® and a release changeover to the software’s new generation. We found that TID – represented by Mr. Daniel Binder – was extremely competent, innovative and on-time for both projects. Following data export from SAP, the process chain was completed in a very short time and with little effort. The processes are very stable and easily mastered. 

By using CATALOGcreator® we were able to reduce the creation of faulty orders and workload of our Customer Care Center considerably.”

Manja Mauska, Team manager E-Commerce, Otto Bock Healthcare GmbH