Wenzel America’s Year in Review

tweety

2015 has been a successful and interesting year for us at Wenzel America!
In looking back at the year that was, I would say there are 8 things that stand out:

  • New Customers
  • New Partners
  • New Market segments
  • Becoming the 5-axis kings
  • Metrology Matters!
  • Social Media & Marketing that adds value
  • Good business – Always focus on Win/Win
  • Great team – Delivering great service

A solid foundation keeps them coming back

It’s good business to have repeat customers and many of our orders this year came from existing Wenzel CMM users such as Whirlpool, GE, and Pratt & Whitney. It’s customers like these that give us a solid foundation and challenge us to continuously push the envelope in measurement technologies and always providing comprehensive service to even the largest enterprise companies.

Reaching out to new customers — in a big way

But, the truth is there are not too many players out there who buy multiple CMM machines per year. It’s therefore our job to spread our message of precision metrology as far and as wide as possible to reach the tool shops and manufacturers who haven’t heard of us.

In such a vast geographical market – all North America, from Canada down to Mexico – we cannot know who all our potential customers are. And even if we could the question becomes, “how do we reach them?”

Well, we’ve been busy all year using some of the more ‘modern’ methods of getting our message out there – social media, blogs and the web. This has been an interesting challenge for our team and whilst we wouldn’t consider ourselves experts we have certainly learned a lot!

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question

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As we end 2015 we have 7 times the Twitter followers @WenzelAmerica than we had at the start. We focused a lot on re-tweeting industry information we thought added value to our followers plus some of our own Wenzel news. We are closing out the year with over 2,000 tweets! Not bad for a bunch of seasoned engineers.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s video worth?

youtube logo

We’ve added 20 new videos to our

YouTube Channel

this year, including 9 locally produced videos.

Eight of the new videos were from our Metrology Matters Live! Open House in June. We had a great turn out for the Live event where we compared the capabilities of 7 systems on the same unique part. But the videos have racked up a nearly 1,400 views since! There’s no way we could have reached that many people through just an Open House.

Marketing that adds value — all by itself

The material from that event also helped us to produce our 3rd white paper of the year – A 7 Systems Analysis. It was a great team effort from the Wenzel America crew and our marketing partners at LeDuc Creative. We think we put on a great show, and apparently, so do you.

The next piece of our marketing tour de force is our Metrology Matters! Newsletter and the accompanying Blog, which you are obviously aware of – since you’re reading it now. This article and the 3 others we posted this week mark 50 total articles published in 2015!

Alongside these web-based marketing efforts we of course attended a number of industry trade shows and placed ads in important industry journals – but always with a tie back to our expanding Internet presence.

New partners – good business still depends on great people

Part of the solution for reaching all your potential customers must include the Internet, social media and attending your industry’s shows. But, no matter your business you’ve got to have people who can meet your needs on the ground. Without the help our sales and service partners we couldn’t deliver the level of service our customers need everywhere they are. This past year we’ve the pleasure of working with a new partner in the Northwest called Vantage Measurement, and their knowledge of the region, its needs and customers helps us reach people we otherwise would not. Even more breaking news on the sales partner front – just last week we signed on a new Midwest partner – watch this space for more news.

Styling studios are seeing the power of Wenzel’s experience

One of Wenzel’s strongest products is our styling studio solutions. Our styling studio solutions are a combination of expertise producing good value horizontal arm CMMs plus a specialized DesCAD software built specifically to help clay modelers along with laser scanning, clay milling, and other accessories made for this unique application.

We cracked the U.S. market this year with orders from independent studios, makers of off-road vehicles, motorbike makers and truck manufacturers. We are delighted to be finally delivering Wenzel’s unique precision solutions here.

Just call us “The 5 Axis Kings”

While we’ve been involved in 5 Axis Scanning from the very beginning, 2015 was our best year ever for delivering Renishaw REVO systems – we’ve delivered 10 so far and we expect more orders before the year’s end. Most of these deliveries were to traditional REVO customers in Aerospace and Automotive applications, but some went to new applications and sectors in metal spinning and long shaft measurement with the help of the surface finish attachment and the 800mm long RSP3 extensions.

revo accessories

REVO 2 brings a whole new range of accessories that open up even more applications for Renishaw’s game changer.

Good business – before & after the sale – always win/win

Our Aftermarket business has grown 15% in 2015 – we achieved that by offering high value for the money services and the most aggressive pricing on Renishaw accessories in the market. This has been real WIN/WIN/WIN – A win for us, a win for you, and a win for our partners at Renishaw.

A great year built by a great team that brought it all together

up chart

One of the things that gratifies me most about this past year is that we have maintained our staff here throughout 2015 – this proves to me that our people like working with our products and we’re a good company to work for. Of course we offer fair pay and top-end benefits, as we should but I think the part that helps us keep great people is their belief that working in a family-owned company is really like being part of the family.

We have ambitious targets for 2016, so stay tuned in! Our internal team and our partners look forward to working with you and all of our new customers delivering the Wenzel standard of machines and service while building the future – together.

Andy Woodward
President
Wenzel America