With approximately 2,700 employees worldwide and annual revenues of around €500 million, the SAUTER Group operates as one of Europe’s established leaders in building management and room automation. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, with development, logistics, and marketing functions in Basel and a production site in Freiburg, Germany, SAUTER has been delivering building lifecycle solutions for more than 100 years. Supporting complex technical infrastructures across large commercial and industrial environments requires structured service coordination, clear contractual governance, and consistent execution across regions.
As a manufacturer of climate control systems for large buildings, Sauter operates in a specific ecosystem. This ecosystem is made up of building owners, tenants, and maintenance companies. “One of our pain points”, says Eric Kortz, Manager of Smart Components & Solutions at Sauter, “was to combine all these parties involved in the maintenance & repair processes in one single field service solution.”
“We can have a call request from a maintenance company, for which we need to inform the tenant and invoice the owner, sort of speak. Routing all these processes and communication flows was time-consuming and not easy to follow up.”
Contract management
The next pain point was that each building could have very different service agreements. For some buildings the maintenance is on Sauter, for others, it is an external maintenance company, and for some buildings, it can be a mix. Technicians need to be aware of all parties involved, what they have to do themselves, and what part is for someone else.
The reporting must be adapted to the situation. Sometimes Sauter only needs to inform they did an intervention, in other cases they need to list all the used parts and working hours or communicate detailed inspection reports.
Integration
Sauter is using Navision 2009 and an integration with Navision was essential for this project. All the customers and parts catalogs are listed there. Financial statuses and agreements are as well managed in Navision. A two-way synchronization between Navision and Wello Solutions was mandatory.
