For more than 100 years, the globally active SAUTER Group, with its headquarters and a development, logistics, and marketing site in Basel (Switzerland) as well as a production site in Freiburg (Germany), has provided products, expertise, and solutions for building management and room automation over the entire building life cycle.
Sauter has grown significantly in recent years and now employs 350 employees at the Basel site and 2,700 people worldwide and has a turnover of approx. €500 million, making them one of the leading providers in the building automation sector.
Multi-party ecosystem
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.
