Bottrop pump specialist is now the holder of the TOP 100 seal for exemplary innovation management

“All things flow” — stand­ing still is not an option: At SEEPEX, one of the world’s lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers of pro­gres­sive cav­i­ty pumps, the com­pa­ny claim goes far beyond the man­u­fac­ture of first-class high-tech pumps. With new devel­op­ments such as the holis­tic “Dig­i­tal Solu­tions” con­cept, the medi­um-sized com­pa­ny is lead­ing the clas­si­cal field of mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing into the future in a tar­get­ed man­ner. Now the Bot­trop-based spe­cial­ist can offi­cial­ly count itself among the nation­wide inno­va­tion elite. On June 19, SEEPEX was award­ed the “Top 100 Seal” for exem­plary inno­va­tion man­age­ment and above-aver­age inno­va­tion successes.

In Bot­trop, the “Inno­va­tionCi­ty Ruhr”, future-ori­ent­ed ideas and solu­tions have been devel­oped for the past ten years with the aim to meet the chal­lenges of cli­mate and struc­tur­al change in urban areas. And there are also com­pa­nies that have suc­cess­ful­ly and for a long time already been con­tribut­ing to such inno­va­tions at the heart of the Ruhr area. For almost 50 years, the fam­i­ly com­pa­ny SEEPEX in Bot­trop has been devel­op­ing and build­ing pro­gres­sive cav­i­ty pumps, mac­er­a­tors and con­trol sys­tems. The man­u­fac­tur­er has con­tin­u­ous­ly devel­oped its pumps fur­ther and intro­duced new pump tech­nolo­gies in order to con­stant­ly improve its own prod­ucts and, for exam­ple, enable easy main­te­nance. Dig­i­tal solu­tions for the con­trol and mon­i­tor­ing of pumps have long been offer­ing great added val­ue; in most cas­es, these are devel­oped togeth­er with key cus­tomers and tai­lored to their indi­vid­ual needs. The SEEPEX man­age­ment has risen to the chal­lenge of dig­i­tal change at an ear­ly stage. In the seg­ment of pro­gres­sive cav­i­ty pumps, which con­veys ‘del­i­cate car­go’ such as rasp­ber­ries just as gen­tly as thick chunks of sewage sludge in the envi­ron­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy sec­tor, the com­pa­ny plays a pio­neer­ing role with­in the inter­na­tion­al indus­try with its “Dig­i­tal Solu­tions”. The holis­tic con­cept offers a port­fo­lio of mobile and net­worked ser­vices, rang­ing from dig­i­tal­ly sup­port­ed main­te­nance of the pump using vir­tu­al real­i­ty, through dig­i­tal pump man­age­ment with sim­ple spare parts order­ing, to data-based services.

80 per­cent of SEEPEX prod­ucts are export­ed world­wide. The com­pa­ny, which was found­ed in 1972, now has 18 sub­sidiaries and branch­es out­side Ger­many, as well as dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters in over 70 coun­tries. There are more than 800 employ­ees world­wide, 423 of whom work at the com­pa­ny head­quar­ters in Bot­trop. This is also where the heart beats for new ideas.

For the top inno­va­tor, dig­i­tal­iza­tion is the most impor­tant inno­va­tion of the past few years. Pumps can now be mon­i­tored in real time. With the SEEPEX tools, main­te­nance can be car­ried out part­ly by the cus­tomers them­selves and even remote­ly. This means that cus­tomers can access, con­trol and mon­i­tor the pumps with a mobile phone or tablet. The mea­sured val­ues are loaded into a cloud where they can be ana­lyzed by cus­tomers or by SEEPEX. An inter­nal team of data ana­lysts deals with data min­ing and anom­aly detec­tion. This saves time and costs and also secures pro­duc­tion, as mal­func­tions can be avoided.

In Bot­trop, a dozen employ­ees con­sis­tent­ly over­see the dig­i­tal change, while the man­age­ment com­mits a large amount of time towards push­ing inno­va­tions for­ward. Every year, around 200 sug­ges­tions for improve­ment are received from the work­force, two-thirds of which can gen­er­al­ly be imple­ment­ed. Between 2016 and 2018 alone, SEEPEX was grant­ed 13 patents at both nation­al and inter­na­tion­al lev­el, plus cer­tifi­cates attest­ing to the pumps’ high­est stan­dards. For exam­ple, they meet the high­est hygiene stan­dards in the food sec­tor and are cer­ti­fied accord­ing to EHEDG. Even the iF Design Award for inno­v­a­tive indus­tri­al design has already been award­ed to the SEEPEX tech­nol­o­gy SCT because besides all of its func­tion­al­i­ty, easy han­dling is also to the fore.

All this and much more impressed the jury of the TOP 100 com­pe­ti­tion, which was held for the 27th time this year. Inno­va­tion researcher Prof. Dr. Niko­laus Franke from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na and his team test­ed around 120 para­me­ters for the selec­tion of the top com­pa­nies on the basis of a sci­en­tif­ic sys­tem. Here, SEEPEX was eas­i­ly able to main­tain its posi­tion in the league of the most inno­v­a­tive Ger­man medi­um-sized com­pa­nies accord­ing to the strict cri­te­ria. An award cer­e­mo­ny with the men­tor, sci­ence jour­nal­ist Ran­ga Yogesh­war, has had to be can­celled this time due to the coro­na restric­tions. In Bot­trop, the man­age­ment and staff are nev­er­the­less very hap­py: “The same pas­sion with which we have been work­ing con­tin­u­ous­ly for almost 50 years on the tech­ni­cal side to cre­ate top prod­ucts also dri­ves us to work togeth­er con­tin­u­ous­ly on the future. We are proud that SEEPEX is now one of the TOP 100,” says own­er and CEO Ulli Seeberger.

“Inno­v­a­tive medi­um-sized com­pa­nies like SEEPEX GmbH from Bot­trop are not afraid of change, but see it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty. In the sci­en­tif­ic selec­tion process, the com­pa­ny impressed in the largest size cat­e­go­ry (com­pa­nies with more than 200 employ­ees) espe­cial­ly in the cat­e­gories of “Exter­nal Ori­en­ta­tion / Open Inno­va­tion” and “Inno­v­a­tive Process­es and Orga­ni­za­tion” accord­ing to the com­pe­ti­tion ini­tia­tors. They were par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed by the way the com­pa­ny works on new prod­ucts and ser­vices: Inno­va­tions are cre­at­ed in a close exchange with the cus­tomers. Inno­va­tions are devel­oped step by step and test­ed with the most impor­tant cus­tomers (“lead users”). “Only when the cus­tomer suc­cess­ful­ly ben­e­fits from the added val­ue is fur­ther devel­op­ment – or adap­ta­tion – car­ried out,” is how SEEPEX CTO Dr. Chris­t­ian Hansen explains the pro­ce­dure. “It is not uncom­mon for us to dis­cov­er poten­tial for improve­ment among the cus­tomer’s process­es as well – for us, this is an impor­tant approach and con­fir­ma­tion that we can pro­vide our cus­tomers with greater sup­port in this respect.”

Since 1993, com­pa­me­dia has been award­ing the TOP 100 seal of approval for spe­cial inno­v­a­tive strength and above-aver­age inno­va­tion suc­cess­es to small and medi­um-sized com­pa­nies. Since 2002, the sci­en­tif­ic man­age­ment has been in the hands of Prof. Dr. Niko­laus Franke. Franke is the founder and direc­tor of the Insti­tute for Entre­pre­neur­ship and Inno­va­tion at the Vien­na Uni­ver­si­ty of Eco­nom­ics and Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion. The men­tor of TOP 100 is the sci­ence jour­nal­ist Ran­ga Yogesh­war. Project part­ners are the Fraun­hofer Soci­ety for the Pro­mo­tion of Applied Research and the Ger­man Asso­ci­a­tion for Small and Medi­um-sized Busi­ness­es (BVMW). As media part­ners, man­ag­er mag­a­zin, impulse and W&V pro­vide advice and sup­port for the com­pa­ny com­par­i­son. More infor­ma­tion is avail­able at www.top100.de.