Customer centric approach at Fergas

– Made-to-order production and customer focused information flows

Fergas is a third generation family business that has evolved into a global supplier of curved metal blower wheels, cross flow blowers and AirBlaster units. Fergas is a trusted partner to several different industries such as the appliance, automotive and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) industries. 

- A great benefit is that StreamServe has given us the possibility to offer documents tailored to the needs of each individual customer. In our core business the aim is to find optimal solutions to whatever the customer's issues are, therefore it is only logical that we also tailor our business communication to the customer’s needs, says Magnus Pettersson, CFO at Fergas.

The overall focus for Fergas at this point in time is being ”lean”, i.e. doing things in a simpler and more efficient way. In a market place where competition is fierce it is extremely important to always improve internal efficiency. - When we decided to implement StreamServe, more than ten years ago, the main advantage was that it gave us the ability to manage the documents outside M3, which also allowed us to do design and layout work ourselves. This in turn, gave us flexibility and independence. Since then, we have been able to solve a lot of problems with StreamServe EDP. The changes have been made without affecting the ERP system.

Our production facilities are located in Sweden and in Asia. Sales are made through agents to industrial customers all over the world. Usually, the agents do not have their own distribution center, which means that goods are shipped directly from production to the customer.

- As our production is completely based on customer orders the customer information should be included in all production documents. Without StreamServe that would have been difficult to achieve. Even more importantly, we can now adapt the delivery documents to each customer’s requirements, says Magnus Pettersson. Examples of customer needs are barcodes, letter codes based on the customer’s own system, as well as specific areas on the document where these codes should be found. We can use the customer identification number to let StreamServe automatically create delivery documents with this specific information.

Most of the purchase orders, order confirmations, pro forma invoices, and delivery reminders are sent out via e-mail. Invoices are still sent out on paper. The customer often wants copies of all documents at the time of delivery. With StreamServe PDF files are automatically created when printing a document and this makes it easy to e-mail copies to the customer. The quality is much better than before, when the fax machines were being used for this purpose.

Fergas has achieved cost savings by using standard, white paper for all business documents instead of pre-printed papers with each company’s logotype and footer. Now, when logotypes are printed on standard paper, changes can easily be made and paper waste is kept at a minimum.

- The ability to manage several languages is another area of great importance to us, says Magnus Pettersson. With part of the production in China we need to support “simplified Chinese”. It has taken some initial work, but we are now able to produce the documents we need with Chinese characters. We solved this without investing in a separate system environment or additional applications.

- For me, excellent business documents are documents where the recipient gets the information he needs. With an efficient information flow we can support our customers in an excellent way. StreamServe EDP gives us the ability to focus on business instead of administrative issues.