LiSEC Creates New Hub Structure
In order to focus even more on customers and their needs in the future, LiSEC is revising its branch structure and optimising the structure for customers, by expanding individual branches worldwide into so-called focal branches or hubs, each of which is responsible for a specific market region. These hub regions cover the entire global market.
Accordingly, more resources and more know-how can be pooled in the focal branches or hubs, and the coordination of after-sales activities, in particular for a flexible and rapid response, will be increasingly carried out by these focal branches in the future, say officials.
In total, LiSEC's branch structure will comprise six regions in the future; due to the geographical expansion of the China, South-East Asia, Oceania, Australia and New Zealand region, there will be two and thus a total of seven focal branches or hubs in this region:
Regional Hubs
- North Western Europe (Hub: Germany)
- Southern Europe/Africa/Latin America (Hub: Italy)
- Central and Eastern Europe, Commonwealth of Independent States (Hub: Poland)
- North America (Hub: USA)
- China/SEA/Oceania (Hubs: China and Australia)
- Middle East/India (Hub: UAE).
- Austria, Hungary, Israel and Japan will continue to be serviced directly by the head office in Austria.
“With its worldwide network of offices, LiSEC has always been close to the customer. In accordance with the market size and the installed machine stock, there are naturally also smaller branches in this network. In the smaller branches, however, it is only possible to maintain the service resources and the know-how required for the large number of products and solutions in order to be able to meet the support needs of the customers directly from the branch to a limited extent. Therefore, for more difficult issues, the support of the service centre in Austria must always be requested. Due to what is often a time difference of several hours between the customer's home country and Austria, due to travel times for technicians that may be necessary, but also due to language barriers and the longer distances through the organisation, support for customers in these cases is sometimes not as quick and as flexible as customers expect and as we want to guarantee in any case,” says Gottfried Brunbauer, CEO of the LiSEC Group, describes the considerations that led to the optimisation of the branch office structure.
The remaining branches are coordinated by the respective hub in whose region they are located; administrative tasks and management activities are pooled in the focal branches as far as possible.
The central organisation in Austria is still available as a backup for demanding solutions at any time, but due to fewer time differences, shorter travel distances for technicians as well as fewer language barriers and shorter distances through the regional organisation, many more issues can be solved flexibly and quickly through the regional organisation than before.
Concentrated expertise and resources
From the new focal branches, the entire region will be supported in sales and service issues.
This structural change not only improves the proximity to the customer, it also makes communication channels shorter and more efficient; response times are shortened and faster, and the speed of solutions for customers is increased.
“Through the new structure, the knowledge required for professional, even more technically sound customer advice for the sales process will be made available increasingly in the regions. On the one hand, this is done by our own employees as well as a close cooperation network with agents to support the different national languages and to look after markets with less continuous demand,” says Christian Krenn, director international sales at LiSEC and also responsible for the sales activities in all branches worldwide.
Dr Roger Hafenscherer, director international after sales service at LiSEC, and responsible for the installation, start-up and service activities worldwide and in all subsidiaries, regarding the changes, says, “Fast, uncomplicated, high-quality help and ideally in the respective national language―that is what our customers expect and also get.
Implementing customer projects professionally or meeting their needs as best and as quickly as possible was what originally prompted me at LiSEC to first develop a hub strategy for after-sales service. In a second, logical step, we then fully integrated sales into this concept in order to serve our customers and any interested parties in the same, efficient manner on the sales side as well, thus ensuring the advantages of the hub concept for our customers worldwide in all aspects. It is only possible to offer customers an ‘all-round stress-free package’ if the entire organisation works together. I am very pleased with the implementation of the first hubs and the improvements achieved, but I also believe that the full increase in performance towards our customers will only come to fruition gradually over the next few months. This is not least because we will be going through a certain learning curve with the improvements in internal business processes that this will bring about. However, the goal of focusing even more clearly on our customers reinforces our motivation.”
