New Locomotive Family Task Force

Abstract

[EN] Vossloh Locomotives has developed a new locomotive family that complies with all existing and upcoming standards regarding emissions, safety, security, noise reduction, fire protection, and software. In order to launch this product a consulting team from the University of Applied Sciences in Kiel, taking part in the European Project Semester, was commissioned to create and propose a market and marketing concept, which includes the identification of customer potentials, defining sales activities, events and other tasks. In order to approach every customer in the most efficient way, a customer potential analysis was required. Filtering hundreds of customers from a database to analyse sales potential was a challenge. With the aim of handling this high amount of data efficiently and effectively, a new analysis tool is developed, based on several existing analysis methods. Particularly, it considers more than one criterion, has an objective scoring method and in addition, it enables to segment the customers in groups of A, B, and C customers. Evaluating the customers via this tool guarantees that the result is meaningful. Outcome is a list of A, B, and C customers. Parallel to that, new marketing activities are developed. Therefore, a high amount of new ideas arose in several brainstorming sessions. With the purpose of using only the most effective and efficient ideas, the marketing activities are evaluated and the best are selected in order to create a marketing concept for every group of customers; i.e. A, B, C customers. As a result, a plan is developed to approach every group of customers, depending on the importance to Vossloh. Furthermore, a Roadmap is established that indicates the procedure of the launch of the new locomotive family.