Heidelberg invests close to £1m in UK

Heidelberg UK is centralising all its functions and demonstration facilities at its 10,000 sq m site in Brentford, West London. A comprehensive Customer Support Centre is being created, underlining the company’s commitment to rapid and effective response in the UK and Ireland.

The new Customer Support Centre will employ close to 50 (of Heidelberg UK’s 340 staff) in Help Desk, technical, works control, sales support, product management and marketing functions.

“Our experience from bringing these different functions closer together in the Southern Division has proved so successful over the past few months that we realised just how much our customers had to gain from us extending this to cover all of the UK and Ireland,” says George Clarke, managing director. ““Integrating sales and support functions improves communication and customers receive a faster and better service.”

Specifically the company is looking to use this stronger pool of expertise and the wider adoption of remote service to ensure maximum accuracy in diagnosis of a fault, increasing the level of remote-only fix rates and ensuring that, when an engineer does need to be sent out, he is armed with the right information and correct spare parts. This means a quick repair and reduced downtime for the customer.

Heidelberg is now rolling out its eCall programme, taking remote service one step further. eCall means that the Prinect Press Center can alert the operator to a technical issue and at the push of a button, raises and despatches a notification and error message to Heidelberg with no intermediate telephone call. If the operator identifies a problem himself he can also initiate the notification using the eCall button. The error messages created are automatically analysed, allowing the helpdesk to investigate the problem and in certain cases order and despatch parts or even resolve the problem remotely.

Packaging equipment will continue to be available for demonstration at the international facility (Hall 11 in WiesIoch, Germany) because this remains a sector dominated by large groups and the range is so comprehensive, including VLF products, that it makes sense to optimise the use of this huge 4,000 sq m (43,000,sq ft) facility.