ProXES GmbH

ProXES: three brands, one goal

In 2015, the three process specialists FrymaKoruma, Stephan Machinery, and Terlet combined their expertise under the umbrella brand ProXES GmbH. The investor-led machine manufacturer from Hamelin, Germany provides machines, process lines, and solutions for the food, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and advanced materials industries.

The product portfolio covers every need for processes like cooking, cooling, cutting, emulsifying, grinding, and more. To help customers get the best possible results from their machines, ProXES employs trained chefs alongside the engineers and process technologists in its 400-strong workforce.

What’s more, over 80 dedicated technicians service and maintain 100,000 machines in over 170 countries around the world. To make this a reality, Stefan Hummel, Group Director Service at ProXES, first had to restructure his own processes.

The challenge: decentralized and fragmented processes

When the current ProXES Group was formed in 2015, it brought together the processes, systems, and teams of three independent brands with nine sites around the world. These included two production plants in Switzerland and Germany as well as seven service and distribution centers, each with its own ERP system.

With each brands’ processes and IT systems having evolved in different ways over the years, pooling all this data was no easy task. Sales and service teams had particular difficulty in access machine drawings or spare parts and maintenance lists. Content was either unavailable or fragmented.

For information on mechanical seals and other parts, the service team would have to send queries to the plant, which often weren’t answered until at least the following day due to the time difference. “Our service teams are our calling card, but they often weren’t able to assist our customers fast enough,“ says Stefan Hummel.

To address this, he set the following objectives:

• Enable the service centers to independently support customers by having spare parts and service information available without having to send queries to the plant;
• Digitalize the information available in the plants, such as bills of materials;
• Simplify the process for generating spare parts and service data as well as spare parts catalogs;
• Reduce throughput times for queries; and
• Increase revenue from spare parts and boost customer retention.

Software search ends with Quanos

To overcome these challenges, Stefan Hummel wanted a software solution that could bring data together in one central location. This solution was also to serve as the basis for a spare parts shop that could be used by internal customers and subsequently also by external customers to search for and order items themselves.

After comparing multiple providers, he settled on Quanos SIS.one. “Since we were already using Schema ST4 for our technical documentation, this decision made sense,“ says Hummel.

The project began with a two-day workshop with specialists from Quanos, during which a proof of concept was devised. This served as a roadmap and showed ProXES what was possible with the existing data and how Quanos SIS.one maps data, processes, and systems.

Step-by-step implementation

Implementation began in February 2023, beginning with the preparation and import of data from FrymaKoruma. To do this, a project team of five checked and categorized data for over 70,000 items. In just under six months, all catalogs were available in Quanos and all interfaces had been set up.

In March 2024, the rollout began at Stephan Machinery and Terlet, which took a little longer. This was because much of the data was organized in Windows folders and standard work instructions were missing, making the preliminary work significantly more time-consuming. “The delay was never down to Quanos, though; the team provided us with the best possible support at all times,“ says Stefan Hummel, who is proud that his team can now work with well-structured data despite all the hurdles they had to overcome.

Since May 2025, ProXES service employees have finally been able to access a total of 13,000 catalogs from FrymaKoruma, Stephan Machinery, and Terlet. While the data goes back as far as 2013, the company has actually been building machines for over 70 years. After weighing the costs and benefits, however, the company decided to import all data from the introduction of SAP in 2012 onward, to keep the complexity manageable.

More time for customers and increased sales

Stefan Hummel is more than satisfied with the result: “The system is indispensable to us now and our different sites greatly value SIS.one.“ ProXES's service technicians can access drawings and parts lists while at the customer's premises, and deliver faster results in the case of maintenance or repairs. “This has dramatically increased our first-time fix rate,“ says Hummel.

The technicians now also have more time for proactive customer engagement and can focus on revenue growth. HMI integration should also increase revenue while reducing effort, allowing customers to order spare parts directly via the machine’s display.

Implementing Quanos SIS.one also brought improvement for internal workflows. “The project helped us to consolidate our fragmented software structure,“ says the service manager. Thanks to modern interfaces and automated processes, each new machine is created automatically in SIS.one.

And with data categorization having been carried out during the implementation phase, SIS.one now also generates spare parts kits automatically. “This is something we simply didn’t have before—we used to have to create every maintenance parts list, including quotations and orders, manually. Today we can do all of that with a single click,“ says Stefan Hummel.

Results since the introduction of Quanos SIS.one:

• 6x increase in efficiency: quotations can be generated in 15 minutes instead of 1.5 hours and with next to no ERP input
• Time savings: subsidiaries save an average of 1.5 days
• Usability: onboarding of new employees takes just 15 minutes thanks to SIS.one’s user-friendly interface
• Increased sales: 12% annual organic growth in global service in just two years and with no increase in team size
• Higher ROI thanks to a single solution for all brands

Success factors: optimizing service processes

With the introduction of Quanos SIS.one as a central solution for service information and spare parts catalogs, ProXES was able to make its previously fragmented processes and systems faster, more robust, and consistent worldwide.

For service managers facing similar challenges, Stefan Hummel has the following recommendations:

• A coordinated, motivated, and well-prepared team with clear internal project management should not be underestimated as success factors.
• Digitalization projects rely on data. Companies should therefore check and optimize their data quality early on. Doing this as part of a preliminary project, for example, can save several months of implementation time.
• Digitalizing and synchronizing processes and systems is a team task, and companies often need external support for this. Project managers should therefore consider using external partners, such as ERP interface experts or translators, and integrate them strategically.