Endress+Hauser inaugurated a new 80,000-square-feet Customer Center at its U.S. headquarters in Greenwood, Ind., this week. The facility represents a $16 million investment in infrastructure and is designed to help optimize Endress+Hauser's customer support in the U.S. market.
According to Endress+Hauser, its U.S. business has grown at an annual average of 16-plus percent over the past 10 years, which has allowed it to make significant investments to build out its U.S. product and service centers. “We want to be close to our customers providing the best possible support,” says Matthias Altendorf, CEO of the Endress+Hauser Group. “Our investments reflect both our commitment to customers in the process industry and our promise to sustainably generate outstanding value for them.”
Endress+Hauser's Customer Center features an auditorium-style conference/training room that can seat up to 190 people, a cafeteria (“Cafè Blue“) with Starbucks coffee bar that can seat up to 200 people, a Wellness Center with 1,000-square-feet fitness room, a certified training facility with multiple classrooms, a calibration facility, a functioning control room, and Endress+Hauser's largest PTU (Process Training Unit) for real-world process simulation with over 120 measuring points. Training, calibrations and repair are stationed under one roof, and there is additional space for increased customer technical support.
RELATED: Endress+Hauser & Rockwell Automation to Host Process Solutions Summit
Over the last five years, Endress+Hauser has invested approximately $150 million in its U.S. operations alone, expanding its flow, level, pressure, analytical, and temperature manufacturing capabilities, as well as investments in support structures, projects, services and training organizations. This figure does not include expenses related to the recent acquisitions of SpectraSensors, Inc. and Kaiser Optical Systems, Inc., both of which specialize in advanced analyzer technology. Endress+Hauser says the U.S. market is its second biggest worldwide, trailing only Germany.
Endress+Hauser’s new Customer Center is suited to greet visitors with a top-notch certified training facility with multiple classrooms and its largest yet PTU controlled by Rockwell Automation’s PlantPAx system for real-world process simulation with over 120 measuring points.
Todd Lucey, Managing Director of Endress+Hauser Sales Center USA, said he believes that one of the keys to market success in the U.S. is owed to heavy investments made in customer training—the new Customer Center being one of them. “Customers can send operators, maintenance personnel, engineers and other process people to our new Customer Center to get hands-on, real-world application expertise in a state-of-the-art customer training facility,” he said. “Customers are increasingly faced with process and business issues and they can’t get this type of unique training anywhere else.”
