Pneuhage Reifendienste (Pneuhage Tire Services) is a part of the Pneuhage Group, one of Germany's leading independent tire dealers and service providers. The company has had great success in using the geomarketing software solution RegioGraph for its sales and marketing activities.

From its origins as a family business in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1953, Pneuhage has expanded to a thriving enterprise with 92 subsidiaries. Pneuhage offers professional consultancy for all types of tires and tire usages, from private cars and company vehicles to forklifts, bulldozers and agricultural equipment. Pneuhage's large network of subsidiaries includes companies that specialize in tire-remolding for utility vehicles as well as tire and aluminum wheel rim wholesalers. In addition to its German-based activities, Pneuhage also has operations in foreign markets, including Poland and Slovenia.

The geomarketing software solution RegioGraph has been a valuable tool for Pneuhage's marketing of utility vehicle tires and the presentation of its products and services to commercial customers and distribution partners. To succeed in the German market, Pneuhage has had to gauge regional potential very precisely. The Federal Office for Motor Traffic has highly detailed geographic data on the number of registered vehicles in Germany. Now, thanks to RegioGraph, Pneuhage can use this data to determine and display the number of vehicles registered within the subsidiaries' catchment areas.

"Thanks to the excellent data contained in RegioGraph's district and municipality maps of Germany, we can easily and quickly import data on vehicle numbers into each territorial layer and thus analyze the market potential for our branches," explains Erwin Schwab, Product Group Manager for Truck Tires.

Pneuhage has a car breakdown service that is operated in association with renowned service providers. This places a completely different demand on RegioGraph. The critical factor for success in running an automotive breakdown service is the amount of elapsed time between the initial distress call and the point at which the vehicle in question can resume its journey. Consequently, Pneuhage uses RegioGraph to define operating zones for which certain service times can be guaranteed.

Breakdown service zones usually cannot be displayed on the basis of postcode districts alone, but rather - and more importantly - the actual routes taken by the major roads and highways that comprise a given region's transportation network. Pneuhage utilizes RegioGraph's map editor to create customized service areas that meet this unique need. In short, the company manually alters postcode boundaries based on their proximity to major roads, allowing them to generate service zones organized around the trajectories of the local transporation network.

Erwin Schwab sums up the advantages of Pneuhage's use of RegioGraph: "With RegioGraph, we have an easy-to-use tool for linking geographic information with regional market information. The results of evaluating data with RegioGraph are visually very appealing and thus lend themselves to presentations for customers and partners."

Pneuhage is currently planning to put RegioGraph to use in yet another area -- the company's intranet. Pneuhage will use the program's HTML export function to generate sales territory maps containing important information, such as contact details for the product consultants assigned to a given region. These maps will then be distributed to company employees, thus improving both transparency and internal communications.

Autor:

Werner Tietze, Management Assistant, Utility Vehicle Sales

Werner.Tietze(at)pneu.com

Visit Pneuhage at www.pneuhage.de.