Lay offs at Hiedelberg

[madjock]

More bad news in the industry, I heard today that Heidelberg are closing down their Canadian marketing office, now it all goes through their office in Atlanta.
As well as those losing their jobs in marketing they have also laid off some service egineers and other staff.

 

[Marko]

My salesman was forced to retire as well. Heard it was a good number of people.

 

[rbailleu]

I can't imagine it being this bad for heidelberg. but everyone is too worried to buy new stuff.

 

[[email protected]]

Times are tough. A few months back even Presstek laid more people off. I guess being a smaller part of the market no one hears about things like this.
OG

 

[RGPW17100]

Heidelberg laid off 70 plus people at the beginning of the year. Most were techs which are hard to get when needed. We had a electrical problem with our sm 52 and it was down. Quickest we could get a heidelberg electrician was 3 days.

 

[junker1984]

Please keep in mind, RGPW, there are a lot of independent techs out there, some of us don't have all the information needed to complete a repair as efficiently as a Heidelberg employee, but when you consider the lower rate per hour, and your independent tech is straight up with you on what he can and can't do, it may be to your benefit to develop a working relationship with one of us. Regards

 

[unlimitedtrafficsitecom]

You do what you have to do.
In order to keep your doors open...............

 

[RGPW17100]

I had four hours of phone support and was sent a bunch of parts for sat delivery. I found the problem was the electrical cable either got caught on something mechanical or blew open. I just bought some wire from Lowes and fixed it myself. Techs I spoke with could not help. Problem was it was between xmas and new years and a lot of their people were on vacation. Even so it is real tough to get a guy in same day now and that machine is the only thing paying the bills right now.

 

[VladCanada]

Help assistance via phone line, having no chance to look at ... I had only 20% success.

 

[CD102]

Help assistance via phone line, having no chance to look at ... I had only 20% success.

I'm curious. Is your press outfitted with the newer type system where the remote person can actually get into the machine's console to check for error codes? That's been one of the big selling points for newer presses beyond the faster makereadies and higher running speeds is that KBA, Roland and Heidelberg can troubleshoot press problems from thousands of miles away.

 

[RGPW17100]

Phone based support went into the press but could not find the problem. Kind of like a car some errors dont show even if the car wont start like an intermittent fuel pump. In the four years we have had this press this option has been of little help. When our cpu fried we could not even get into it to let Heidelberg in.

 

[CD102]

It would be interesting to poll the owners of these support systems and see whether their success level is as poor as yours has been to date. I know that this has been a big selling point for new hardware in this industry. If it doesn't work as advertised, then I see why everyone is buying old iron rather than new.

I can understand it not working if the CPU was fried. That should be the main interface that the telephone tech support uses for diagnosis.

 

[Mike Herndon]

I'm curious. Is your press outfitted with the newer type system where the remote person can actually get into the machine's console to check for error codes? That's been one of the big selling points for newer presses beyond the faster makereadies and higher running speeds is that KBA, Roland and Heidelberg can troubleshoot press problems from thousands of miles away.

Our cp2000 machine is set up for remote access. It does help and we've used it quite a bit over the years. The biggest help came when a pressman missed a step taking the press out of perfecting causing a synchronization error. Heidelberg logged on and with the help of the pressman manually put the press back to mechanical zero. the Heidelberg tech engaged the hydraulics remotely while the pressman manually turned the press back to zero. What impressed me about this was it was 1:00am Sunday morning and the Heidelberg tech was over in Germany I think or at least not in the USA.

Remote access has also been a big help if your peripherals(chiller/dryer etc) have CAN software. Our dyer was showing error codes and Heidelberg was able to log in and help us track them down. etc etc.

We have a older CP 1.04 machine without remote access. We can still trouble shoot this machine over the phone with success using the service screens and error displays but it takes longer.


But for all that money they are not supposed to break right??

Mike

 

[canadian printer]

tough in canada

tough in canada

More bad news in the industry, I heard today that Heidelberg are closing down their Canadian marketing office, now it all goes through their office in Atlanta.
As well as those losing their jobs in marketing they have also laid off some service egineers and other staff.

Our company went with Komori with our new press due to all the shake up with Heidelberg and poor service. End of a era? Hard to say our shop was all Heidi since the start ....times change.

 

[Tron]

My team at manroland uses the remote support system telePresence to fix presses every day. There is a reason that manroland has won the GATF Intertech award for remote diagnostics and no one else has.

 

[Shurup]

We have telePresence here at our R510 and the remote support at MANRoland really helps us out at about 95% of brakedowns. I would give them 5 stars of 5 in service.
On SM 74 we have modem connection to service. Never had any case it helped us. Only serviceman at our site every time.