Spain, Poland, the United Kingdom and now also Italy – Vecoplan stated that it is consistently expanding its service bases in Europe to be geographically closer to its customers and provide them with even better services.

The company is one of the leading suppliers of machinery and equipment to process primary and secondary raw materials for thermal and material recycling. It now offers faster spare parts supply, reliable on-site support and higher availability of their plants and machines to its customers.

“Our branch offices and nearby service bases facilitate communication with customers regarding complex projects,” introduced Jochen Pfeil, Head of the Services division at Vecoplan AG. “We can use this approach to implement the best possible solutions for our customers,” explains the Vecoplan expert.

Besides Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom, Italy now also has a Vecoplan service base. Over the years, Vecoplan has built up a large installed base in that country. Until recently, it relied on a distributor to look after its customers.

“However, the demand for reliable service continued to increase,” said Pfeil. “So we decided to improve our well-known service and make spare parts available faster.”

Vecoplan expands its service base to Italy for faster spare parts supply and greater customer proximity.

To shorten its response times, the Westerwald-based company has now opened an independent service and sales office in Ferrara, in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. The facility, which has an area of about 500 square meters, also includes a workshop. This offers adequate space for working on entire machines.

In the future, Vecoplan’s specialists will also weld special components like rotors. The service team currently consists of five employees who know the country and the market inside out. Besides being experts in mechanical and electrical engineering, they are trained in work with machine control units and are always up to date with know-how.

“This means they know the machines better than any service partner,” stated Pfeil. “What’s more, they are available locally. In the past, we had to send employees from Germany to Italy when there were complex problems. This was not always in keeping with customer requirements.”

The team includes a service manager for coordination and an independent sales representative. Vecoplan will continue to expand its team as needed. And if the Italian branch does not have enough manpower to handle a problem, trained service partners can provide support.

Italian customers also benefit from a consistent supply of spare parts. A service warehouse with all the standard spare and wear parts is currently being established.

This will enable Vecoplan to supply its Italian customers directly from Ferrara instead of from Germany, as in the past. Such deliveries sometimes took a long time, and the current problems with supply chains have made this worse.

“The new warehouse will enable us to increase the availability of our machines and plants,” continued Pfeil. The Westerwald company also offers special service agreements to respond to customers’ needs. These agreements give customers guaranteed response times or include inspection and maintenance packages to increase the availability of their machinery and equipment.

“The Italian market is greatly in need of such speed and reliability,” said Pfeil. “That’s because it’s a little different from other markets in Europe.”

Although speed and reliability are important throughout the world, Vecoplan has found that these factors mean even more to Italian users. This applies in particular to machine downtimes.

About 90% of such machines are used for the production of recyclates, and a smaller percentage are used for processing waste wood. With both of these applications, high availability is essential.