Heidelberg to focus customer support at Brentford HQ

Heidelberg is to centralise its customer support and relocate its demo facilities to its Brentford, London headquarters, which will benefit from a £1m revamp to support the move.

The restructure will result in the closure and ultimate sale of its Tamworth facility next March. Affected administrative staff at the midlands site, totalling 16, are currently under consultation; with Heidelberg UK managing director George Clarke estimating that 12 jobs in total will be lost.

The closure comes just over a year after the company unveiled Tamworth as its 'national showroom' and two years after the closure of its Leeds demo site.

"When there were 14,000 commercial printers in the UK it made sense for us to have more regional bases but with the 3,500 or less today and with the range of remote service and high tech communications tools we use, a single central base is just plain common sense," said Clarke.

The new customer centre will employ 50 staff, and by centralising the facility Clarke maintains that the company will be able to better manage service, by increasing communication internally as well as enabling staff to resolve more issues remotely and minimise service times by pre-arming engineers with detailed information and the required parts.

"Our aim and our customers' aim has got to be 'first-time fix' and focusing support will help that," said service director Ian Wilcock.

However, Wilcock stressed that the Northern and Southern divisions would still have dedicated managers and teams. "We have a complete belief that divisional directors run sales and service, and they are run together, because they have to be," he added.

The customer centre will also manage the roll-out of Heidelberg's eCall, a pre-diagnostic system for its Prinect enabled presses, with its first UK customer, ESP Colour, going live next week.

Building work will begin at Brentford in the next few weeks, with the demo centre being extended by 150sqm to 650sqm, with a new configuration and floor. According to Clarke it will be big enough to house five presses and a raft of finishing and pre-press kit.

"The range of equipment we showed at Ipex is what we want to be able to show on a regular basis," he added.

Heidelberg UK employs 341 staff in the UK, and, Clarke said the closure of Tamworth will have no impact on sales and service staff numbers.

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