Who was it that said that autumn was a time for hot chocolate mornings and toasty marshmallow evenings, and best of all, leaping into leaves? It was Winnie the Pooh. But anyone looking for a lightweight consumer blower to clear fallen leaves and loose twigs after a blustery day will not find it at PILLER Blowers & Compressors.
PILLER Blowers & Compressors, the German-based family-owned business, is known around the world for its industrial-strength high-powered blowers and compressors – not the kind seen advertised on a home shopping channel at 2:00 a.m.
This midsize business with 400 employees worldwide provides customized solutions for fuel refineries, industrial furnace construction, mechanical engineering, power plants, wastewater treatment, and other related sectors.
PILLER product are in demand because each blower is tailored to customer specifications – making each unit a truly one-of-a-kind item. What’s more, PILLER strives to offer its customers innovative, value-added services to support the customers’ business in every way possible. But all wasn’t milk and honey for PILLER.
Innovation Leads to Differentiation
Like a lot of other companies, PILLER was finding it difficult to differentiate itself based solely on the products manufactured – even though it was building first-class merchandise.
PILLER’s success depended upon finding new ways to meet customer expectations by offering value-rich services – innovative maintenance and service processes to round out great blowers.
PILLER brainstormed with consulting partner IBsolution to align its service processes with the Internet of Things (IoT). By equipping its blowers with sensors, PILLER could gather valuable data in the SAP Cloud via an IoT connection.
This helps to identify potential problems early on, giving PILLER service technicians time to replace at-risk components before failure. What’s more, in case of irregularities, several processes trigger automatically. Now, automated tickets get posted in the service portal, and notify the customer and PILLER for faster resolution and prevention.
The bottom line: IoT-based predictive maintenance reduced resolution time and minimized blower downtime – leading to higher customer satisfaction.
PILLER’s Path to Happy Customers
PILLER improved its services with innovative IoT technology and strong integration into backend systems using SAP solutions, which enabled the company to develop new business models to serve customers better and build customer loyalty opportunities.
SAP Customer Experience solutions serve as a stable, scalable platform enabling PILLER to develop new business models to serve customers better and build customer loyalty opportunities.
PILLER uses the SAP Customer Experience portfolio to inspect and work with customer tickets, dispatch service technicians, and fulfill field service. Broad integration across multiple lines of business lead to automated service billing and easy capturing of spare parts quotes.
Experience Management solutions from SAP and Qualtrics close the loop on any missing customer insights throughout the process. To capture missing customer insights throughout the process, automatically generated surveys capture the feedback after the service fulfillment.
Finally, management gathers these insights through an SAP Analytics Cloud solution dashboard. This combines the customer experience data from sales and service with IoT aggregates – culminating in happier customers all around. PILLER is focused on knowing what its customers need before they even know themselves.
All in all, the benefits for PILLER and its customers have been impactful, including:
- Improved maintenance and service process
- Added value for customers through smart services
- Reduction of the average resolution time for service tickets by 20 percent
- Reduction of the average time to gather machine data by 50 percent
- Increase in after sales revenue by 10 percent
“Our aim is not only to supply first-class products, but also to inspire our customers with innovative services throughout the entire life cycle of industrial fans,” said Thomas Henzler, CIO, PILLER Blowers and Compressors.
Or, perhaps to paraphrase Pooh, “This is a journey to be experienced, not a problem to be solved.”
To learn how PILLER Blowers & Compressors is thrilling its customers, check out its pitch deck for the 2020 SAP Innovation Awards for complete details.
