Kuhn is one of Europe's largest equipment companies, with operations in nine countries. The group stands for reliable partnership in the construction, transportation, warehousing, and logistics sectors. Kuhn's building machine division has exclusive marketing rights for Komatsu products, Powerscreen and Pegson screeners and crushers and FRD hydraulic hammers.

The loading engineering division sells Palfinger truck cranes and Mitsubishi forklifts. Kuhn has had exclusive marketing rights for Palfinger cranes since 1986 and has a market share of more than 50% in Austria. It is the general importer of Mitsubishi forklifts in Austria, Hungary, and Poland.

Challenges
Kuhn operates in a tough competitive environment and needed a system supporting their equipment distribution requirements and capable of supporting their multi-language and multi-currency requirements. Kuhn also wanted to offer 24 x 7 customer access to an easy-to-use Internet parts store, with easy online access to information including price & availability, the ability to build frequent order lists, access to their online parts transaction history, the ability to specify convenient parts drop locations and to buy parts against their credit account.

Solutions
Infor's strong partnership with e-Emphasys and complete backing of eXtend supported Kuhn's decision to evaluate the extensive industry-specific development and OEM integration capabilities provided by eXtend. The unparalled combination of major company support and unmatched functionality for the equipment dealer and rental market led Kuhn to select eXtend.

Kuhn also deployed the eXtend EPartsStore, After two years of operation, Kuhn reported that ePartsStore orders have grown to represent 10% of their total customer parts order volume.

Results and Benefits
Kuhn's early adoption of eXtend enabled them to provide valuable product feedback to e-Emphasys. Recently, Kuhn management decided to upgrade to the most current version of eXtend. The availability of eXtend's AEMP Geomatics and other OEM interfaces offer additional customer service, productivity and efficiency improvements for Kuhn.

• In less than two years since its introduction, 10% of Kuhn's parts revenues are generated through ePartsStore. This significant customer preference reduced Kuhn's Parts counter staff workload.
• 95% of the orders received from ePartsStore customers are processed through ePartsStore.
• An increase in same-customer purchases following access to the portal suggests the ease-of-use and 24 x 7 availability of this product support tool has strengthened Kuhn customer loyalty.
• Since Kuhn requires portal customers to accept responsibility for the accuracy of their orders and to agree to restocking fees for errors, the average error rate associated with portal orders is just 0.3%, significantly below the 3.4% average Parts counter order error rate.
• The reduction in order errors also reduced Kuhn’s inventory carrying costs and the costs associated with processing vendor returns.

Kuhn was so pleased with ePartsStore, they wrote a recommendation letter to other eXtend customers. Click here to learn more about their experience.

For more information about Kuhn Machinery, please visit http://www.kuhn-baumaschinen.de/.