How to keep up with operational and market changes

Zooming in on OEMs’ future needs 

Operational and market conditions are changing at an enormous pace. What does that mean for OEMs and how can they react to changes while developing, ensuring, and maintaining high-quality heat pumps and boilers?

OEMs face tough challenges in future

OEMs are forced to react to various operational challenges and ensuring lean and reliable operations has become quite a task. From managing procurement to guaranteeing quality to overseeing and optimising supply chain efficiency to providing streamlined production processes.

At the same time, OEMs' product and service offerings are expected to balance the demand for increasingly complex, digitalised systems and growing regulatory requirements on energy and resource efficiency.

Not to mention sharing and nurturing a strong relationship with installers, distributors and end-users, and informing them on the newest industry trends and products.

How to react to key market conditions

Market conditions are changing at tremendous speed, leading to a growing demand for intelligent products in the HVAC industry.

With 63% of European installers being positive about the development of more intelligent products within HVAC, OEMs are in a unique position to shape the future and become the go-to experts of the future-oriented installer.

What's more, decentralisation of the energy supply has gained momentum among environmentally conscious installers. This is why guaranteeing a supply of fossil fuel-free products in heating, cooling, and hot water generation has become an important task for OEMs. To serve these new market trends, OEMs need to be flexible and adaptable – and so do we. That’s why we’ve taken the following three steps:

1) Global set up and local expertise 

OEMs need direct, local service, close customer contact, and flexibility in case of production bottlenecks. The global setup of our 5 OEM-certified independent units covers the full value chain, from commercial to innovation to products and projects to operations.

This way, we can share expertise and experiences in a localised and specialised context. At the same time, it includes a dedicated digitalisation team to provide real-time data and optimised, energy-efficient products for our customers on a global scale.

2) Customised service through mirroring

Quality in design and trouble-shooting is just as important as a future-proof technology and insights into the trends, problems, and pain points of tomorrow.

Dedicated responsibilities for each service area – commercial, technical and operational – make customised service possible. This setup enables us to provide you with the 'right people' directly. Purchasing managers should be able to talk to Grundfos' key account manager if they have a request. And similarly, should technical managers talk to Grundfos' technical key account managers if they have a technical inquiry.

3)  Future-proof support

OEMs should be able to co-create and co-manage new, innovative solutions. They should be included in the whole process, from testing ideas and concepts to prototypes, to the co-development of the products.

By experiencing your pain points, we know where to improve. Only through that, can we come up with new ideas to move your business forward.

This ensures a strong pipeline of future innovations, such as advancing cloud-based services or the development of future-proof heat pumps, in line with the current needs of OEMs.