Focus on Customers to Become a 200 Year Old Company - Kenz Figee HydroSym Case Study

How can we be on our way to becoming a 100 year old company in today’s conditions? Kenz Figee Group, a company on it’s way to becoming not just 100 years old but 200 tells us it is all about:

– focusing on the customer
– transparency, quality and value at all customer touch points
– recognizing new opportunities

Kenz Figee Group, combines almost 200 years of experience in the design, production and maintenance of offshore- and harbour cranes. Company roots in designing and building harbour- and land-based cranes date as far back as 1836 in Haarlem, the Netherlands. With the increase in offshore drilling and production activities in the North Sea, Kenz expanded their product portfolio towards offshore hoisting and lifting equipment in the 1980’s. Today, they lead in tailor made offshore cranes and special equipment for the offshore energy market.We had a chance to talk to Peter Hutte, Software and Industrial Automation Manager, and Gudrun Uriot and Nicky Knook, Hydraulic Engineers, about their work and how HydroSym Software helps them reach their objectives.

Kenz Figree is the oldest crane manufacturer in the world nearing 200 years as a company, when asked what is the competitive advantage that keeps the company moving forward so successfully, the team agreed it that it’s developing their core competency while keeping customers at the core.

“Our company is good at delivering custom build, tailor made solutions to our customers. We keep this our focus, while continuously innovating to improve our work process.”

Peter Hutte, Software and Industrial Automation Manager

The team at Kenz have implemented HydroSym, hydraulic schematic software, to support them with two main ongoing objectives:

– Deliver faster to the customer
– Continuous quality improvement

By having close relationships with their customers, they are able to get involved early in the process and work together with already during the concepting phase.

Here, HydroSym helps them to put together a hydraulic schematic based on customer requirements. Already in this phase they are able to deliver value by implementing suggestions so that our customer is receiving better visibility of the project even before the design phase starts.

Once the customer is happy with the concept, it is very easy for the project team to move on to the next stage which is budgeting. HydroSym has a built-in library of all custom components Kenz uses making it easy to turn a schematic into a complete project file including all updated technical data sheets. HydroSym is integrated with Kenz’s ERP system and generates automatically a Bill of Materials to be taken into account for budgeting.

Providing transparency and visibility is an important aspect of working together and we have a number of check points before the project is delivered.  There is a factory acceptance test, then installation, then site acceptance. After the project is delivered we continue to deliver value to our customers with our After Sales Service.

Timely and proper maintenance of offshore cranes and equipment is of vital importance for safety and for ensuring longer lifetime of the equipment. Through Kenz Crane Services customers receive extensive maintenance, refurbishment and modification services.

Here hydraulic schematics realized with HydroSym can be accessed and viewed by Kenz service team, as well as customer’s teams. The components are linked to the data sheets for easy identification of parts and servicing.

Kanz’s nature of custom work means they are creating custom components. Kenz team uses extensively the Components Plus function inside the built-in library of HydroSym. The Components Plus function enables them to save these new custom components in their internal Paro Library. This helps to create a “one central point of truth” that can be referenced by their global teams. The central reference point eliminates countless emails and time lag across time zones, helping teams to collaborate in real time. In this way quality can be assured as the Kenz teams know exactly where to find the up to date information about components.

It would not be possible to achieve 200 year status if Kenz didn’t continuously look out for new opportunities. Trespassing geographies and time zones to be where the customers required them, for example in Singapore and the recent opening of a local office in Saudi Arabia.  Starting out as a harbor crane company, Kenz expanded into offshore equipment and compensated gangways. Recognizing that renewable energy sector is booming, Kenz has been able to also serve this industry. Kenz can deliver a full package for different types of vessels with cranes and compensated offshore gangways per custom requirements.

About Paro Software:
Paro Software is the creator of HydroSym, software for designing flawless hydraulic schematics, HydroMan, software for designing hydraulic manifolds and HydroCAM software that turns hydraulic manifold design into a CNC machine program to produce the manifold.