SEW-EURODRIVE South Africa has launched an online purchasing platform to streamline procurement for its customers.

The company’s training manager Zander Claassens says the portal allows customers to order products and parts and access documentation and computer-aided design, or CAD, data. The service also has in-person support to assist customers with online requests and provide hands-on advice and assistance.

“The online purchasing portal offers users many useful tools and functions, valuable information and practical assistance,” says Claassens.

He highlights that the wide and dynamic range of configurations in SEW-EURODRIVE’s offering means that the shopping cart had to be specially developed to make it as user-friendly as possible for customers.

“We have developed four different functions that customers can choose from when adding a product to the shopping cart,” he explains. “The first is through our product configurator, which guides customers in configuring their required equipment – using drop down options from our vast range.”

The spare parts or replacement product selection function allows customers to use the SEW-EURODRIVE serial number found on the product nameplate to request a replacement and to ensure that the exact configuration is replicated.

Customers can also find a SEW-EURODRIVE replacement product for a third-party drive,  which is not an SEW-EURODRIVE. “Our online tool will not understand the non-SEW-EURODRIVE serial number, of course, but if the specific criteria are supplied, we will know what the customer needs and we will supply,” he says.

Registered customers can also complete a customer transaction overview to help select a specific item. When logged into the online purchasing portal, a history of quotations and orders can be viewed. This makes it simple to re-order a component that has been purchased before, as customers can select the item from a previous transaction or quotation.

“Lastly, customers can use the drive selection assistant – a smart online tool that guides the user through three simple steps to find the right drive,” says Claassens. “The first step is to select the application, and the second requires more application-related information; the third step then presents the customer with product configurations and suggestions – from which they can choose.”

“Our cybersecurity is handled by a dedicated information technology team at our group headquarters in Germany,” he explains. “Our customer and transaction data are double-encrypted when working online, while the online support is run on hyper-text transfer protocol secure and is backed up on a geographical redundancy cloud-based system.”

Another security precaution is that credit card purchases are not used for online purchasing, and the company follows its normal customer payment protocols once items have been placed in the online shopping cart.