AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Executive Summary “Talking is ordinary and anyone can do it, yet strategic conversations are as priceless as diamonds when running a business” This statement is essentially summarizing the solution and the problem of Hilti’s loyalty problem with consumable customers in one sentence. Hilti’s biggest resource to gain momentum, trust and loyalty with customers is its sales force. Yet achieving strategic conversations is different than small talk and needs to be beneficial for both parties. This thesis explores the problem and provides solutions towards the loyalty problem with consumable customers by delivering solutions focused on the short and long term. As it is Hilti’s ambition to be the worldwide leader in fastening technology, Hilti’s will need to provide customers with continuous innovative products to engage consumable customers in the long term. In the short term Hilti will need to provide the construction application market with innovative dust- free products. This thesis provides prototypes to show Hilti, ideas that are promising. However, launching these new products on the market will only create short term competitive advantage and not the desired sustainable competitive advantage in the long run. For that an stronger relationship between Hilti’s sales force and consumable customers is needed and within this thesis referred to as long term solution as it will take time to develop to its full potential. To understand the current position of Hilti MO NL in the Netherlands, an internal analysis has been performed to understand Hilti and an external analysis to analyze the market, industry and trends [PESTEL] for Hilti’s environment. Furthermore customer research has provided valuable insights by observing and interviewing customers. All these insights have been carefully analyzed and transformed into strategic factors as input for the SWOT analysis. The resulting SWOT confrontation matrix has provided three strategic directions which have been used in an creative session with students from the TU Delft to converge the project into two main directions. The first strategic direction focuses on delivering solutions for the dust-free anchoring market by tackling the bore hole cleaning procedure before anchor installation. Two prototypes have been developed which focus on dust-free bore hole cleaning. The first prototype is called the hollow brush bits [page54]. The hollow brush bit can be connected to Hilti drilling tools and simultaneously suck away and brush dust particles (necessary step for chemical anchoring applications). The hollow brush bits can be marketed as an family extension line of the Hilti TE-CD /TE-YD Hollow drill bits. The TE-CD / TE-YD are marketed by Hilti as automatic cleaning drill bits which can drill holes from 12 mm till 32 mm without the need to clean holes afterwards. The hollow brush bits can be marketed as semi-automatic cleaning bits as it cannot drill holes rather make hole cleaning more convenient and faster. The second prototype is an manual hand pump and has been designed as a…