Tietjen: Spare Parts Store with Automated Generation of Hotspots

User Report by Tietjen - Vendor of Components an Spare Parts in Agriculture

Tietjen is a family-run company with over 40 years of experience in developing compressed air braking systems. Their 60 employees have made them the market leader for compressed air braking systems. In addition to their systems, they offer 5,000 different variations of retrofit kits. Since their founding, Tietjen has thus sold over 75,000 compressed air braking systems. Their product range includes air brake systems for towing vehicles and trailers, kits and spare parts, and retrofits for trailer hitches. These products can be divided into three product areas and core competencies. These include the off-highway OE sector, which covers air brake systems for tractors, harvesting and construction equipment, among others; the trailer OE sector for center, drawbar and semi-trailers; and the aftermarket sector for kits and spare parts.

 

 

ANTEROS has been used by Tietjen since 2008 and in addition to the efficient and central data maintenance of product data and images, is used for the 100% automated print generation of the product catalog. Furthermore, at the beginning of the project a web catalog was implemented with ANTEROS, in which the website users can view all catalog articles with all PIM data and make targeted searches in them. Now this has been extended to a B2B online store, so that customers can now also buy products and numerous spare parts online.

Tietjen is a customer of INCONY

The Tietjen Online Store made with ANTEROS

Incentive for the Online Store

Tietjen's online store provides their customers with the opportunity to buy products 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while saving them time and money by eliminating the need for a human salesperson. Even if in the past they still had some doubts whether their agricultural customers would be satisfied with online sales, this target group has now also become accustomed to buying products online. Furthermore, the online store allows customers to search for products more easily and efficiently, and they have access to any additional information that has been maintained. Naturally, new customer acquisition and more purchases through the online store was also a decisive factor in Tietjen's decision. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

Business customers form the target group of the online store. It is therefore a B2B store, in which customers can use complete store functions after logging in and have access to all data. The store can also be used by visitors who are not logged in, but they have access to less data and functions. For example, only registered users can see prices, access spare parts and exploded views, and place orders.

Features of the Online Shop

 
  • Several paths lead to the right product
    The online store implemented with ANTEROS has several functions for performing a product search. On the one hand, the classic search field can be used for searches by article/serial number or keyword. Additionally, it is also possible to find the right compressed air system and its spare parts step-by-step via vehicle details such as manufacturer, model and vehicle. Finally, search results can be filtered by category, which is particularly useful for individual parts and kits.

  • Product presentation
    The results of a search are then displayed in a list with name, item number and important parameters. In this list, the customer has the option to buy the selected product directly via one-click ordering, or to compare it with similar products in a product comparison, where differences are highlighted in color. However, the search results can also be further restricted by parameter filters. For more details on a specific product, simply click on it and the product details will open. Here, all users can see the overview data, such as photos, name, item number, characteristics and description, while logged-in users can additionally see the price and assemblies for the spare parts.

 
 
  • Accessing spare parts via assembly groups
    The list of assemblies can be used to directly access the spare parts for this assembly. On the new page, in addition to the spare parts list, you can also see the exploded view of the assembly with all the parts it contains. A special function of ANTEROS.spare makes the exploded view interactive. As soon as the user hovers their mouse over the parts in the drawing, information about the part is automatically displayed and the part can be placed directly in the shopping cart. Furthermore, a navigation function can be used to access other assemblies and their drawing along with a spare parts list.

  • Order directly from the shopping cart
    The shopping cart of Tietjen's online store initially shows customers a list of all selected products with their prices. Furthermore, the billing and delivery address that the user has stored in his user data are displayed. However, one can also specify other billing or shipping addresses for the order. The customer also has the option of leaving comments or something similar for Tietjen in the comments field before submitting a chargeable order to the company.

 
Product list and detail page
Exploded view with spare parts

“The ANTEROS online store provides not only excellent search and ordering capabilities for our customers, but it also makes our wide range of products even more transparent, we expect more sales and still save time and costs. Thanks to the central data maintenance in ANTEROS, we only have to maintain product data for our print catalog and the online store once. Our cooperation with INCONY AG since 2008 has been fantastic and we can only say positive things about the employees.”

Tietjen
Hauke Tietjen,
Managing Director at Tietjen

Hotspots for the Exploded View Drawings

Why it is so Important for Tietjen to Automatically Generate Hotspots?

Tietjen has over 4,000 shop-relevant exploded drawings for the assembly groups of their compressed air systems. Each of these drawings is created in the CAD system and contains 30-100 parts each. The feature to order by clicking on parts within an exploded view is very user-friendly and fits Tietjen's customer group. However, in order to make the exploded views so interactive, the parts in each drawing must be marked via hotspots and linked to article data. This allows the online store to display information about the part whenever the part is selected. However, if these hotspots had to be set manually, this would be far too time-consuming given the volume of approximately 200,000 hotspots. Therefore INCONY developed a new additional function of ANTEROS, which generates hotspots automatically.

Automatically set hotspots

ANTEROS Automatically Generates Hotspots

In order to automatically generate hotspots, information is exported from the CAD system, converted and then imported into ANTEROS. This is initially done for all drawings and their parts and later for new drawings. To do this, the exploded view drawing is exported from the CAD system together with metadata about the parts it contains, such as coordinates, position number and part number, and transferred to the hotspot generator in ANTEROS. The hotspot generator assigns significant areas (hotspots) to the drawing. For this purpose, a circular interactive area is created for each part item number in the drawing and linked to the part number. The hotspot generator then imports the drawing, part data and part-to-drawing link into ANTEROS. After that, online store users can order parts by clicking on the exploded view drawing.

Data Maintenance with ANTEROS.pim

Automatic Transfer of Spare Parts Data from ERP

Tietjen has several thousand spare parts at their disposal. This data, such as article number, name and price, is stored in the proAlpha ERP system. Here, the allocation of spare parts to assemblies and of assemblies to air brake systems is also stored. This master data and relations are imported from ANTEROS via an interface at regular intervals.

Easy Data Maintenance

Even before Tietjen introduced the online store, ANTEROS.pim was used for central product data maintenance. From this database, Tietjen's print catalog was and will continue to be created 100% automatically using ANTEROS.print. For this, information such as marketing texts, images, characteristic data and relations were maintained in ANTEROS for all main products and numerous important spare parts. The components, their parts and exploded drawings were added for the online store. Overall, Tietjen can maintain data very efficiently in the ANTEROS PIM system, particularly by linking products and their vehicles via various object types and relations. For Tietjen, this results in a significant time saving, since all data is maintained only once, but can be used multiple times for the store and the print catalog without any additional effort.

Tietjen's data maintenance

Conclusion Made by Tietjen

Online Store with ANTEROS.web

The search functions in the online store implemented with ANTEROS provide Tietjen's customers with an extremely well-managed search of products and their spare parts, which is mainly due to the ability to quickly narrow down products using parameters. In addition, ANTEROS can save significant time on both sides of the sales relationship, as customers can now order spare parts directly from exploded drawings thanks to the hotspots, and Tietjen does not have to create these manually and only have to maintain a lot of data for the print catalog and the store once.

Cooperation with INCONY

For over ten years, Tietjen has been more than satisfied with INCONY and the work they have done. The competent employees are always ready to tackle new requirements or questions with sound advice and fast service.

ANTEROS - See for Yourself!

INCONY enables you to outperform the competition. Are you interested in what is possible with the technology-leading ANTEROS system and how far you can optimize your processes with it? Did the Tietjen report on the spare parts store with automatic hotspot generation win you over? Request your free software demo now!

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