In recent years, the medium-sized company has not only built a completely new company building, but has also considerably expanded capacity in various departments. In addition, the service department has been reorganised under the leadership of Rainer Luithardt and is receiving a lot of positive feedback from customers.
‘With the newly formed team, we have been able to take our customer service to the next level,’ explains owner and CEO Günter Holp, pointing out at the warranty rate for his company’s products which is less than 1%. He adds: „Making mistakes is human; it happens to everyone who works, whether at our company, at the dealer’s or even at the customer’s site. The important thing is to always get the best out of our service department for our customers in terms of quality and speed, that’s what we do with a lot of passion.”
Key department at Holp
Service has always been one of the most important departments at Holp, partly because the RotoTop is robust and designed to last for more than one excavator lifetime. Unlike other manufacturers, Holp is able to offer a genuine factory overhaul of the RotoTop. Currently, a large number of customer devices from the years 2008 to 2015 are being overhauled and made fit for a second excavator life. In addition, the expanded production capacities required due to the growing number of dealers within Germany and abroad also require a corresponding manpower in service.
In order to meet these requirements professionally, not only a lot of dealers are being trained in comprehensive service courses, but there have also been some personnel changes in the internal service department. Günter Holp was able to recruit Rainer Luithardt, who has made over 40 years of experience in metalworking and is a master craftsman in precision engineering, as head of the five-member service team. In addition, he was self-employed for a long time and held leadership positions, which means that he is very good at strategically organising and implementing tasks. After just a few months at Holp, Rainer Luithardt has already earned his nickname ‘the perfectionist’ because he always completes tasks promptly and, above all, to the highest standard.
Rainer sees this quality as a natural part of his work: ‘For me personally, it’s all about the mechanics. I find it very satisfying when we repair a machine that has already worked for many hours so that it can continue working for just as many hours, usually on the next excavator.’ When customers get their refurbished device back and are thrilled with its quality, for him it’s the greatest praise and the best possible incentive for his daily work.
High quality and a strong team
All coordination within the service department is handled by Angélique Kirsten, who has been working at Holp for seven years in various areas and has extensive knowledge about background processes and procedures. She pulls all the strings in the back office, ensures ideal organisational conditions, is the first point of contact for customers, coordinates all service orders and keeps track of deadlines and turnaround times.
Three colleagues, Valeriu Cocerba, Salvatore Marino and Alhagie Bojang, support Luithardt with tasks such as inspecting the devices on arrival, dismantling and cleaning the parts, and the final assembly of the refurbished and repainted parts. All five colleagues now form a well-coordinated team, complementing each other at all levels and thus are able to provide customers with fast and effective support whenever it is required.
Recent customer feedback shows that this approach works extremely well. One example is Yannick Ackermann, Product Manager at Swiss company Hutter Baumaschinen AG, who sent an email expressing his gratitude for the ‘top service’, the extremely fast repair and the prompt return of his equipment.
About Holp
Holp GmbH is a medium-sized family business based in Murrhardt, Swabia, which was founded in 1979 by Franz Holp as a traditional earthworks company. Günter Holp joined the company in 1990, tested tiltrotators for the first time in 1992 and developed a trench drag bucket for his own use. From 1997 onwards, Holp concentrated on the construction of attachments and launched the VarioLöffel® in 1998. This was followed by further patents and developments, and from 2007 onwards, rotary drives were marketed under the name RotoTop®.
In line with the motto ‘We don’t want to be the biggest, we want to be the best’, further patents were registered in the following years and the product range was expanded. The principle applied was that a new attachment would only be designed if a performance increase of at least 25% could be expected at the time of development.
Partener Principal
MATEK Build Smart