Vaillant’s Enterprise Change Management Impact

Vaillant Group, a leader in German HVAC products and services, decided that they needed to embark on a journey of digital transformation. Valliant had to reimagine their change management processes to efficiently increase the number of new product introductions driving top line and bottom line results. To help them along in this effort, Valliant deployed PTC’s Industry leading PLM application suite: Windchill.

As detailed in PTC's latest PLM Product Marketing case study, Vaillant struggled with implementing Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) after their HVAC product design stages were frozen. This struggle took the form of legacy worse practices such as using spreadsheets and that bastion of all inefficient communication: email!

They needed a serious digital transformation overhaul.

So, they put together a 3-phased approach (starting in 2015) that would take them from the old ways of doing ECNs to a highly robust best practice, which would lay the groundwork for future initiatives that include industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and augmented reality (AR).

Windchill was paramount to this initiative. And from 2018–2019 Valliant saw a whopping 54% increased efficiency in responding to and implementing ECNs.

But the story doesn’t end there.

What makes Vaillant’s story so compelling with regards to their change management improvements is that they made the effort to track and measure these processes both before and after their new PLM implementation (below). 

From this KPI table of PLM efficiency data, you can clearly see that with PTC's Windchill solution, Vaillant cut their process lead time of ECN implementations by half.

Getting this part of their digital house in order was a vital step in their overall digital transformation. Now Vaillant is looking to take it to the next level and beyond. With Phase I of their PLM roadmap complete, Phase II (approx. 2017–2019) is rounding out their focus on compliance, costs, and other measures. Phase III (2020–2023) is where things really “heat up” for this Deutsch HVAC manufacturer.

Among some of their more exciting PLM/IoT/AR digital goals are digital twins, 3D printing, digital factories and IoT on application levels, and AR/VR/MR for help in servicing their industrial hardware.

With Europe experiencing their hottest month on record in July [2019], the need for HVAC products and services has never been greater.

Vaillant is putting in a bold new valiant effort to meet their country’s air-conditioning needs and beyond!