MURTFELDT, a family organization with its head office in Dortmund, is a provider of technical products. 700 staff members at six production facilities across Europe produce high-performance plastics, standardized and personalized elements, and semi-finished items for 10s of thousands of clients worldwide. Robert Höhner, who is running the business in the 4th generation, has actually positioned it as “a specialist in a specific niche market” and wants to lead it into a significantly digital future. He discussed to an audience of around 50 visitors why his company requires additional digitalization, what capacity this opens up and which challenges he and his team have actually already conquered along the way.
Like in many sectors, digital platforms, which make it possible to manage consumer enquiries extremely quickly, quickly and instantly, have actually likewise developed themselves in agreement production in the past years. In addition, a new generation of customers increasingly anticipates manufacturers to have digital distribution channels. That is why MURTFELDT’s management decided to establish a new online store, where consumers can immediately obtain quotes and place orders for a wide array of standardized prefabricated parts. “We can provide to 90% of our items through the brand-new shop,” says Höhner. “For individual parts or special tasks that we develop and undertake together with our customers, we naturally still have our direct distribution channel in location.” Apart from which, no place near all of MURTFELDT’s customers want to order online, meaning that the company will continue to provide one-to-one contact in addition to personal recommendations and support– and has no strategies to make any lowerings in sales personnel.
On the way to an extremely integrated system
To develop the brand-new store with the wanted performances, it was necessary firstly to open up MURTFELDT’s closed internal system to customers. Cleaning up and joining together the central IT system with its numerous isolated solutions and interrupted data flows to the point where the shop was prepared to go took over a year. At the same time, nevertheless, Höhner stated that the shop is simply among numerous big digitalization projects: “Our ultimate vision is a highly integrated system that lowers complexity, is scalable, assists in full information transparency and provides a completely automated digital customer user interface.”
Bringing personnel on board was important to the business’s management from the start. Höhner stated: “In this regard, we benefit enormously from the trust our staff members have in us. Lots of have been with us for years and numerous have actually added to our digitalization jobs with a terrific sense of responsibility and their particular know-how.” Establishing the store included, for example, rates, shipment times and shipping and product packaging costs, which can now be calculated automatically. At the same time, the management group has learned, according to Höhner, that a mix of big, centrally coordinated projects and smaller, rapid successes is a promising way to encourage people. For instance, the MURTFELDT group has developed its own chatbot for clients and “fed” it with its comprehensive understanding of products. Another significant project together with the store is automated small-batch production.
Visitors made excellent use of the chance throughout Höhner’s talk to ask concerns and actively add to the discussion. Beverages and snacks later on offered an additional framework for sharing concepts.