Rosenbauer

CATALOGcreator® in action - search spare parts instantly

Rosenbauer is the leading manufacturer of fire fighting vehicles and a full range of associated product worldwide. With the introduction of vehicle-specific electronic spare part catalogs, the service quality will be clearly improved once more. The chief beneficiaries of the introduction of the CATALOGcreator® at Rosenbauer will be technical documentation, the spare parts sales and the service engineers.

Rosenbauer worldwide

Rosenbauer is leading manufacturer of fire fighting vehicles. With its wide range of municipal fire fighting vehicles and aerials built to both European and US standards, its extensive series of Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting vehicles (ARFF) and industrial fire fighting vehicles, advanced fire fighting components and fire & safety equipment, Rosenbauer is the industry's full-liner.

With 12 manufacturing and 6 trade operations, and a worldwide sales and customer service organization, Rosenbauer has a permanent presence in more than 100 countries. Rosenbauer supplies its products to all target groups: professional and volunteer fire departments, industrial and airport fire departments.

The Group's technological leadership is underpinned by a tradition of innovational strength and by a system of institutionalized design management. Rosenbauer had a turnover of 541 million Euros in 2011 and employs around 2,500 people.

Initial situation

The spare part catalog is produced with great manual effort with Adobe PageMaker and can only be kept up-to-date with great effort. The items lists have to actually be written out by hand. Due to the enormous effort involved in producing the catalog, there are a no vehicle-specific cataloges. The graphics are created with Isodraw design software on the basis of the 3-D models from manufacturing. Altogether, Rosenbauer produces approximately 350 catalogs per year, with approximately modules.

Requirements

Service engineers, service partners and customers expect up-to-date spare part catalogs which are easy and intuitive to access and which allow for quick and clear identification of spare parts. Rosenbauer is the industry leader with its products, which means the service is also expected to be outstanding.

Almost every Rosenbauer vehicle is unique. An individual, vehicle-specific spare part catalog is therefore an evident requirement. To achieve this, the process of creating the catalogs must be largely automated.

Further locations are yet to be provided with the CATALOGcreator^®, so in future they can independently produce their spare parts catalogs.

Solution

The lists of required items is exported onto the ERP System Magic, developed by Rosenbauer in-house. If required, corrections and additions are carried out in CATALOGcreator^® - Editor Tool CC DataOptimizer. The 3D models from the CAD-System Pro-E are saved straight in the highly compressed XVL – format created by Lattice Technology, and used 1:1 in the catalog. 2D graphics are prepared by employees of the documentation department in the illustration program Isodraw. These are saved in the web – standard format SVG.

Hotspotting is therefore no longer required as the CATALOGcreator^® automatically recognises the position number when reading the SVG data. The publication of the catalog in interactive HTML and as PDF for printing happens fully automated. The HTML-catalog is burned onto a CD and is currently only provided as offline -catalog.

Conclusion

The chief beneficiaries of the introduction of the CATALOGcreator^® at Rosenbauer will be technical documentation, the spare parts sales and the service engineers.

Particular mention should be made of the fact that:

• The production process of the catalog is largely automated
• The catalog is significantly more up to date
• The appearance and handling of the catalog has significantly improved
• There are now vehicle-specific catalogs

Outlook

The next step will be the publication of the catalog on the Internet. That will be very easy, with the CATALOGcreator^® as the HTML catalog which has thus far been used offline, but is suited to the Internet without further costs and efforts. An unlimited user administration with web login is already included in the standard delivery option.

Further locations are yet to be provided with the CATALOGcreator^®, so they can in future independently produce their spare parts catalogs.

„The project was handled professionally and without any complications! We always received a response to our special requests. We recently installed a licence at our branch in the US and the implementation happened quick and smoothly. Our American colleagues are as excited as us by the software!“

David Windhager, Director of Technical Documentation, Rosenbauer International AG