As part of its service strategy, AICHELIN Group continues to expand its international service organization. With AICHELIN Service GmbH acquiring the group subsidiary SAFED France SAS, AICHELIN is now putting a focus on its service branch and thus strengthening the Ludwigsburg site. Investments amounting to 200,000 euros go into the expansion of logistics systems and service staff. Customers benefit from service control across all sites, and they will now receive all services and spare parts for AICHELIN and SAFED heat treatment plants from a single source.
As early as 2020, AICHELIN Group, headquartered in Mödling near Vienna (Austria), launched its strategic project to establish an AICHELIN Service Organization in Europe. This contributes significantly to increasing customer satisfaction as well as long-term growth in turnover and earnings and has been successfully implemented now. AICHELIN Group subsidiary SAFED France SAS, based in Besançon (France), has already been part of this Europe-wide organizational unit since 2020 and has now been integrated into AICHELIN Service GmbH, based in Ludwigsburg (Germany), at the end of May 2022.
Around 200,000 euros were invested in establishing the European Distribution Centre as an extension of the spare parts warehouse at the Ludwigsburg site in order to be able to integrate the previous SAFED warehouse. Among other things, investments were made in the procurement of an additional vertical lift module for automated storage and retrieval as well as in warehouse software for the intelligent linking of the picking systems. Moreover, new employees were hired for the expanded warehouse and the logistics team was enhanced with additional specialists. In the coming months, the focus will be on further optimizing the flow of materials, in particular to be able to serve the aftersales of spare and service parts as well as cater to customer needs that arise at short notice even faster.
AICHELIN Service is the global competence center for all customers who use AICHELIN and SAFED heat treatment systems as well as third-party systems. It is a one-stop shop for all services for our customers. The focus is on the planning and execution of maintenance and repair work as well as conversions and modernizations of existing heat treatment plants. Increasing energy efficiency, reducing CO2 emissions, and increasing plant safety play a particularly important role here. This goes hand in hand with the scheduling of service technicians in line with demand and deadlines, as well as the procurement and delivery of spare parts. Through specialist forums and seminars as well as customer-specific training courses, AICHELIN Service offers its customers relevant specialist knowledge and an exchange with experts.
More than 100 employees work in the AICHELIN Service Organization across locations in Germany, Austria, and France and they generate a turnover of around 35 million euros. Responsibility for controlling the overall organization lies with AICHELIN Service GmbH in Ludwigsburg. Close cooperation with the new plant sales department in Mödling in terms of work preparation, plant testing and commissioning has led to a further optimization of service interfaces and processes in recent years, which has had a positive impact on customer and employee satisfaction. At the same time, synergies were formed by using shared services in the areas of supply chain management, HR, finance, IT, quality management, etc. to reduce costs.