AHP goes mobile with calculation assistant and specialized app
AHP sales offer simple cylinder configuration for customers and mobile access to price calculation and additional functions
In cooperation with CADENAS, AHP Merkle relies on mobile technology and has developed an app for calculation assistants and a specialized app for in-house process optimization. Patrick Mußler, international sales manager at AHP Merkle, introduced both innovations at the CADENAS Industry Forum 2014.
The manufacturer of hydraulc cylinders has had a 3D CAD product catalog, based on CADENAS' software solution eCATALOGsolutions, since 2000. Since 2013 this catalog has been available to both customers and AHP sales as mobile app in 15 languages.
The family run business AHP Merkle has been developing, designing and manufacturing standard and custom made hydraulic cylinders of high-quality since 1973. The company's head office is in Gottenheim near Freiburg and has a great number of agencies abroad - in Asia, North America and Europe.
Available on all channels: Calculation assistant now also available as app
When choosing the right component or the different versions of a component, assistants can support engineers and make their daily work much easier. AHP Merkle has set itself the objective to make the calculation of hydraulic cylinders easier for its customers and provide a calculation assistant for this purpose. This way it is possible to calculate for instance buckling resistance, piston speed and force or pressure on the piston.
The calculation assistant, as an interactive and intuitive tool, is made attainable to customers on as many media channels as possible: On the 3D CAD download portal PARTcommunity, on a data CD, in the general AHP app (http://de.ahp.de/produkte/ahpapp) and as an individual app.
"The new calcualtion app offers a very fast, simple and convenient possibility to our customers to integrate hydraulic cylinders into their designs and get to the desired data", says Patrick Mußler.
The AHP calculation assistant is not only available as mobile app but also in the 3D CAD download portal under http://ahp.partcommunity.com.
In-house app for price calculation and for additional configurations
The second innovation AHP Merkle introduced at the Industry Forum 2014 was a specialized app as in-house AHP solution. It offers sales and sales partners of AHP the possibility to access special internal functions such as price calculation and additional component configuration (advanced functions) on their mobile.
Since certain features are not accessible to every customer, it is the aim of the in-house app that AHP sales staff can directly configure special customer requests on their mobile, on-site and calculate the respective price in a fast and easy way. "Due to our specialized app, our sales staff and partners now have constant mobile access to all functions, while these functions are not visible to everyone", Patrick Mußler explains.
The specialized app has i.a. the following in-house functions:
• Advanced calculation functions and value ranges to configure cylinders.
• Price calculation: list price, surplus price, final price, currency conversion for sales staff worldwide
Both the calculation assistant app and the specialized app are designed in AHP Merkle's corporate design. "CADENAS did such a great job customizing it to our design that you can hardly tell the difference between AHP's in-house solution and the CADENAS solution", Mußler told us in his presentation at the Industry Forum.
Here you can read the complete presentation www.industry-forum.biz/rueckblick/2014/vortraege/ahp.