Nido
We liked Sofon from the very beginning. Now we don’t want to be without it.
Jan Warmelink
HEAD EXPORT OFFICE
5 questions for a Sofon User
1 What does Nido do?
“Nido is part of the Aebi Schmidt group. In the Netherlands we produce spreaders and sprayers to combat ice on roads. These ma-chines are sold in the Netherlands and also abroad by our sister firms. These sister firms do not only sell our machines, they also make machines at some locations. We have a factory in Poland that makes snowploughs and a manufacturing location in Germany where street cleaning machines are made. These machines are mainly purchased by municipalities and the Ministry of Waterways and Public Works.”
2 Why did Nido purchase Sofon?
“We started off with a simple product configurator years ago. However, we felt that we needed a more modern system with more poten-tial. We then compared a number of packages, but none of them were as flexible as Sofon. Sofon also offered other interesting possibili-ties. We saw the visualization possibilities as a big plus. Sofon can construct drawings of machines during configuration. The Sofon Sales Configurator (Internet Edition) also offered opportunities for the future. Apart from this, Sofon could work with various ERP sys-tems. At the time, we had a link between Sofon and MFG/PRO but we switched to SAP quite a while ago, as this ERP system is stan-dard throughout the Schmidt group. Now Sofon is to become the standard configurator for the whole group.”
3 What does Nido use Sofon for?
“We use Sofon within the group to configure products and to produce quotations. Nido mainly uses Sofon for the production side of things. We put together machines using a question-and-answer process. This eventually results in an error-free, complete bill of mate-rial. This bill of material is sent on directly to SAP. Sofon is also used to generate quotations. In the past it took us more than an hour to produce a quotation and details were easily missed. Now Sofon doesn’t let us forget anything and a quotation can be made in 15 min-utes.”
4 Has Nido realized any special applications in Sofon?
“Yes, with Sofon we can easily calculate how much weight an axle can bear. If a spreader or a sprayer is placed on a vehicle, the axles often have to bear a weight of a few tons. With Sofon, we can automatically calculate how the weight should be divided over the four axles. For this, we input vehicle and spreader data in Sofon. If the load is too great, Sofon will tell you that another type of spreader is called for. In this way, combinations are never overloaded when they go out on the road.”
5 Does Sofon meet your needs?
“We really liked Sofon from the very beginning. Now we don’t want to be without it. Our ultimate goal is for all our sister firms to work with Sofon. Sales people will then be able to configure our products all over the world. This will improve speed and efficiency and new sales people will then be trained far more quickly. If a new employee knows nothing about our spreaders, he can familiarize himself with the product line using Sofon. This is important for our continuity. In the future we want to look at Sofon’s CRM system, the Sales Organ-izer. At the moment our group works with various CRM systems, but we would like to get just one good replacement for all of them.”