Close relationships with clients and a
knack for reading the market have seen Dewetron grow into a global provider of
data collection hardware and software.
That Jürgen Zaff has spent much of the last
six months traveling around Asia goes some way toward highlighting the kind of
growth that Austrian company Dewetron has enjoyed over the past 18 months. The
Graz-based company started out in 1989 as a four-person team, distributing
third-party PC components and measuring equipment. A quarter of a century
later, Dewetron has upward of 200 staff working in more than 25 countries, and
is a leading data acquisition instrument and software company, with automotive
applications accounting for 50% of its business. As it stands, Asia is one of
the few remaining territories that the company has yet to expand into.
Our
R&D department started 14 years ago, and it has been growing ever since. In
the past three years, the number of staff has tripled
For Zaff, manager of Dewetron’s power
business unit, such growth owes a lot to those humble beginnings. “When I
started at the company in 2000, we had just 17 people. It really felt like a
Dewetron family, with everybody helping each other out. Now we have a lot of
people at our headquarters, but that Dewetron family feeling is still the
same.” In less romantic terms, Dewetron’s expansion is still impressive. The
company quickly graduated from selling other suppliers’ equipment to designing
and manufacturing its own. In 1990, after a conversation at a barbecue party of
all places, the Dewetron team began working on its own products.
Constructive Feedback
Dewetron quickly built a reputation for
accurate, flexible instruments with high sampling rates, and became known for
its commitment to working with customers to constantly refine and improve
testing hardware and software. Indeed, many of Dewetron’s most important
product developments have resulted from entering into a dialog with the people
who use the company’s equipment. “Customer feedback is the most important
feedback,” Zaff says. “For example, say we start with a data recorder with six
channels, and the customer comes to us because they need more channels. They
don’t want to use two instruments, so we improve our hardware to provide more
channels, and also the corresponding software. A few years ago, all the data
calculations and reporting would be done by the customer, and if the
measurement lasted for one hour, analysis would take two weeks. Nowadays
customers want to be able to check results online from their desks. This is the
kind of feedback we get, and these are the things we implement into our
systems.”
The
powerful DEWE-50-USB2-8 measurement system is very compact and meets highest
demands on accuracy and reliability of the measured data.
In 2012, Dewetron launched the DEWE 2
series of hardware. Portable, compact, and equipped to accommodate the
company’s Trion data acquisition modules, the instruments offer customers the
means with which to record a wide range of disparate data through multiple
channels, all synchronized to enable accurate analysis. But, Zaff says,
Dewetron does much more than just provide the tools for clients to capture
data. “You get support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And we also help with
new applications. We have specialist application engineers who go to the
customer, help with the installation of the system, take the first measurements
and the first tests – and continue to help. For example, if a customer realizes
they need an additional feature, then we will try to help them. That
flexibility is one of Dewetron’s key points.”
The
DEWE 2-A4 can be used in-car as a portable data recorder
