How Digital Transformation Helps Customers Accelerate Design and Time-to-Market

Engineers and purchasers face reduce time-to-market pressure by developing products rapidly and with high quality. This pressure drives suppliers to evolve beyond simply providing products and offer world-class multi-channel support. In today's digital world, where the internet makes information readily available, customers expect much of that support to come from digital or online resources.

 

It is worth noting that the process behind choosing technologies for a target application remains unchanged, with the three key phases still being:

 

Searching for and comparing product specifications to identifying the right products.

Not just in mass-production, but small-volume quantities for prototyping.

For additional questions during production and during deployment in the field.

 

However, what has changed is the extent to which engineers and purchasers rely on online resources to support them throughout each of these phases. According to Gartner data, for example, nearly 80% of the buying decision-making process is now conducted on digital platforms, and each of these stages can be accelerated through online services.

 

Advanced Energy (AE), a company with innovation in its core values, has continued to make important investments in its own digital customer experience infrastructure. These investments are designed to make it easier for customers to engage digitally with AE and to help accelerate their time to market.

 

 

Over the past year, Advanced Energy has invested significant resources into redesigning and reconstructing the Advanced Energy website. From the outset, AE's goal was to create a seamless, integrated "One AE" digital platform that improves the customer journey in finding, choosing and purchasing all AE products, while supplying technical information and support for product design and innovation. The entirely new website at www.advancedenergy.com provides immediate access to key information that speeds the creation of highly engineered systems that integrate precision power, sensing and control technologies.

 

The initial phase of the digital transformation effort involved consolidating  multiple individual websites and brands into one cohesive AE brand and online presence. This started with Artesyn in August last year and moved through LumaSense, Versatile Power and SL Power in February, and completed the integration process in May with Tegam.  This brings together a portfolio of power conversion (AC-DC, DC-DC, high voltage, configurables, etc.) and key industrial measurement and control solutions that are now united within the portfolio.

This “One AE” website streamlines the selection and comparison of products - from power and measurement technologies for industrial and medical applications to complex power delivery and control systems for semiconductor fabrication. This is possible due to the integrated smart search, customer friendly product navigation and an intuitive application-centric navigation that enables the best products for a specific application to be found with a minimum number of clicks. 

Visitors are also able to create a customized user journey that includes a personalized dashboard, while the addition of an easy-to-use E-Commerce platform allows rapid ordering of small product volumes for prototyping – either by shopping, paying, shipping and tracking through www.advancedenergy.com or via links to distribution partners that the customer already works with.

 

Advanced Energy strives to continuously innovate and improve its customers’ journeys. The new website has received enthusiastic reviews from visitors who have benefited from a getting desired results and research faster which has many times led to simpler designs and faster time-to-market. The use of the new website has shot up with twice the traffic and triple the engagement (based on number of technical downloads) compared to the older sites. AE’s share of traffic among its competitors has also soared after the new website launch.

 

While AE has already delivered meaningful enhancement with our new website, there remains many opportunities improvement as AE keeps refining and enhancing the online experience for AE customers worldwide. Currently, www.advancedenergy.com offers over 1,000 products online, and this number is growing fast as AE aims to provide a single online location for all products and product lines, whether they are standard technologies or ‘higher touch’ products, such as tailored solutions and platforms that require extra support for customization and optimization.

 

At the same time, Advanced Energy is fine tuning the information and support available based on the most common customer journeys and the feedback received from users. Advanced Energy is also actively investigating how best to integrate AI and scale the platform to further improve the personalized customer experience.

 

We appreciate your feedback. Please share your thoughts with us and help us improve our digital transformation journey. We want to make things easier, faster and more valuable for you.

 

Visit www.advancedenergy.com today.