When innovation became a tradition at OBO

Michael Büenfeld

Chief Sales Officer at OBO Bettermann Group

How did innovation become a real tradition and even part of the company’s corporate DNA? Mr. Michael Büenfeld, Chief Sales Officer at OBO Bettermann Group, told us the story and what it means for everyone involved in the company’s ecosystem.

Dear Mr. Büenfeld, we are delighted to have OBO Bettermann as an active partner for the EUEW convention, once again. How did OBO experience the past two years, considering the pandemic and its challenges for the business environment?

After the outbreak of the pandemic and the resulting lockdown measures, we were faced with two primary areas of activity: Protecting our employees in our company group and ensuring the availability of goods for our customers. We managed to achieve the first goal thanks to the tremendous flexibility of our employees, work from home, protective measures in administration and production and by digitalizing our communication processes. We accomplished the second goal with our high vertical range of manufacturing at our European production sites and our well-stocked warehouses. This enabled us to deliver at all times and to remain a reliable brand supplier for our partners in the retail and trade sectors. It also gave us the opportunity to further expand our market position against the competition.

The OBO Bettermann Group, with more than 40 subsidiaries worldwide, are extremely well positioned and consequently succeeded in offsetting the economic effects of the pandemic in the various markets we are active in. As a result, we were able to look to the future with confidence and invest despite the corona virus pandemic. For instance, we offered all of our trainees who completed their training in spring 2021 full employment.

Another effect of the pandemic: It clearly propelled the digitization process in the electronics industry. It has also led to our collaboration becoming more digital. Whether among ourselves or when communicating with our customers. We, at OBO, responded with great speed and used digital platforms to communicate with our customers.

OBO Bettermann is a company that describes itself as “a company that stands for tradition and innovation, in equal measure”. How does it manage to bring together these two apparently contradicting notions? What does tradition represent and what does innovation stand for at OBO Bettermann?

It is our firm conviction that tradition and innovation go very well together, and innovation has become a tradition in itself at OBO, part of our corporate DNA and even our brand name. After all, OBO stands for "without drilling" and marks one of the first major innovations of our company, which were then followed by many others. Up until 1952, anyone who wanted to place an anchor had to use a drill – then OBO engineers developed the first metal anchor that could simply be placed in the wall without drilling at all. This was a prime example of OBO's innovative spirit: Innovation reflects our claim to constantly scrutinize and further develop our products.

For OBO, tradition means solidarity - with our employees, our customers and the region. As an independent family business, this is what we have stood for over 110 years, and tradition, just like the spirit of innovation, is an integral part of our values and the measure by which we conduct our daily business.

Your company’s product range comprises articles for the electrical infrastructure of buildings and is categorized into the three application areas of industrial installations, building installations and safety and protection installations. For which of these categories do you consider the supply chain to be most challenging and why?

OBO maintains a very high proportion of in-house production in all three areas of application, putting us in the comfortable and secure position of being able to act independently of suppliers in a number of instances.

This was particularly evident in the raw material crisis in the construction sector caused by the corona virus pandemic. We were always able to deliver in full, despite the challenges that arose as a result of skyrocketing prices for steel, wire and plastics and the noticeable difficulties experienced by individual suppliers. This allowed us to show retailers and tradesmen that, with OBO, they have a strong and reliable partner at their side.

Several other companies are not investing in their warehouses owing to a lack of capital and are therefore dependent on "just-in-time" deliveries. This is not OBO's philosophy. We have always invested in high stock levels – this is why we are always able to deliver. This approach has also proven to be one of the main contributing factors to weathering the pandemic as well as we have.

More and more companies aspire to becoming as “green” and “eco” as possible in the near future. Could you tell us what are the plans and the strategy that OBO Bettermann is implementing in this direction?

Sustainability also ranks high on our agenda and has high priority for us. We are already adopting sustainable practices in many areas: for instance, by encouraging energy efficiency at our sites, optimizing our logistics processes to reduce consumption and emissions, focusing on low-carbon on-site generation of electricity and heat, adopting measures for Co2-neutral manufacturing. Let me give you a few examples: At our production site in Hungary, we are harnessing a particularly environmentally friendly source of energy. We have now installed two photovoltaic systems here to harness the power of the sun to operate our production facilities. At our main site in Menden, we are implementing a certified energy management system in accordance with ISO standard 50001. In addition, we are currently introducing reusable pallet systems at construction sites where we are active in projects.

Next, we will also document all our activities in this area and publish them in a sustainability report that complies with GRI standards.

Working in the sales and marketing domain, please tell us how has this domain changed, from your perspective, in the last 5 – 10 years? And what do you expect the future will bring?

The entire industry, but above all the areas of sales and marketing, have become substantially more digitized, and I expect to see the digital transformation continue to grow to an even greater extent in the future. In this context, digitization will support the work of sales, further qualify it, and also make it more efficient. However, good personal relationships between people will continue to play a key role. Digitization will change and complement how people interact, but it will not replace it. This is because business will continue to be conducted between people who, as social beings, have a natural urge to meet and communicate with each other in person.

Michael Büenfeld, Chief Sales Officer at OBO Bettermann Group

Over the last year and a half, the corona virus pandemic has taught us to replace face-to-face meetings with digital meetings. The reason that this form of communication proved to be so efficient and produced such good results despite the physical separation can primarily be attributed to the fact that close personal contacts had been established and maintained over many years between all those involved in the electrical industry.

It will be exciting to see just how the combination of personal contacts and digital communication will work out in the future. The EUEW convention is the perfect starting point and serves as an excellent platform to build on personal communication and to breathe new life into it.

In marketing, we have responded by expanding digital initiatives that focus on customers and their needs. We offer our customers added value on the one hand in the form of work simplification and time savings through our products, and on the other hand in the form of digital service offers, such as our planning software OBO Construct, the digital training offers of the OBO Academy, the dealer search and the notepad function on our homepage or the download offer of BIM data for our products.