Partnership and Solutions

During the last 10 to 15 years technical support for customers via application engineers has become a distributor's standard service which, quite similar to state-of-the-art logistic solutions, has become an integral part of business relationships with customers.

The mere existence of a higher or lower number of application engineers is surely not sufficient to qualify a distributor as "Design-in Distributor", although there is nearly no one left on the market, who doesn't call himself something like that.

In order to differentiate oneself, it is thus not only important for distributors that the customer knows the complete service offer, but that the technical partnership offered really is accepted. This is the only way to actually achieve economic benefits, the desired win/win situation for customer and distributor. If the customer accepts this partnership, a notably strengthened business relationship will develop, which will then make the technical support economically beneficial. These parameters hold of course also true for Sasco Holz, a distributor who with more 40 employees within the Business Development Group lays on a particularly big team for technical customer support.

"Partnership and Solutions" are the cornerstones of recently founded Sasco Holz' company culture, a new organisation which emerged from the merger of the two prestigious distributors SASCO Semiconductor and HOLZ Elektronik.

Thus Sasco Holz closes the gap between broadline and specialized distribution as we offer - despite of our broad product portfolio of semiconductors, Passiv, displays and power supplies - in-depth application support, normally only known from niche distributors.

To guarantee that we are always near our customers, approximately 40 engineers are available throughout Central Europe. 20 of these Field Application Engineers are specialists for systems with different performance levels and in this function support our customers in designing entire applications. Often, however, the profound knowledge of specialists is required in addition. Sasco Holz faced this challenge by founding special Competence Centers for the product segments Analog, Programmable Logic, Display Technologies, Power Supplies and LED Technologies with another additional 20 Application Engineers. Again supported by experts for Passiv, Wireless Modules, Chip Card ICs and Technical Silicones we now have a team which cannot only help our customers to solve problems with individual components but which is able to define a perfectly interacting system solution for the entire application together with the customer.

For additional tasks, as e.g. integration of operating systems or IP cores, Sasco Holz can even establish cooperation with renowned and close design partners.

Thus Sasco Holz surely does not only qualify as "Design-In-Distributor"; the broad product portfolio in combination with concentrated expertise allow real "Solutions Distribution" - Partnership and Solutions.

With the increasing complexity of applications and components offered, the way and schedule of an optimized partnership between the customers' design department and the distributor has changed. Often the distributor's application engineers are not involved before the components have to be selected according to a fixed feature list, sometime even later, i.e. not until design problems arise with the selected components and now have to be solved.

Counselling during the selection process at least guarantees that economic components are selected, which are mature yet not at the end of their live cycle. This saves the customer expensive re-designs. Also when problems with components or tools arise during design, the FAE helps to solve these problems faster and thus get the product to the market in time. However, if you really want to exploit the full potential of a fruitful partnership between customer and distributor, you should start cooperation much earlier: when the system is defined. Only at this early point of time costs can be eliminated from the total system while winning valuable flexibility for the design by using state-of-the-art technologies.

This means that the customer decides how much benefit he can draw from the offered technical support. The earlier specialists are involved, the bigger the long-term benefits of this partnership will be.

Sasco Holz acceded the market combining the best of two worlds: a broadliner's line card and a specialist's support. Now it is up to the customer to challenge this new partner.