A successful and long overdue Sunfab World Conference

17/10/2023

SWC 2023 SWC 2023

This year, the Sunfab World Conference which took place on the 12–13 of September gathered around 80 participants. Invited were Sunfab's distributors around the world, Sunfab's subsidiaries and other stakeholders such as own staff as well as Sunfab's board of directors.

The Sunfab World Conference (SWC) is held every other year, but due to the pandemic, the 2021 conference was cancelled. This year's edition of SWC was therefore long overdue and brought together around 80 participants from 16 countries, from Japan in the East to the USA in the West.

 

Sunfab Certified Distributor Program

Sunfab has a strong belief is that continuous future growth will be realised through distributors. This is formulated in Sunfab's strategy as ”Growth targets shall be accomplished by developing and strengthening Sunfab distribution partner network”.

Sunfab therefore launched the "Sunfab Certified Distributor Program" in the fall of 2018 to strengthen and formalising the relationship with the nearest existing distributors. At this year's SWC, we continued the work together with our certified distributors.

In addition to the already established certified distributors, this year we also welcomed two newly certified distributors, HK Hydraulik-Kontor from Germany and Heizmann AG from Switzerland.

 

Guest lecturers with focus on the development around electrification

Electrification of transport vehicles and construction machinery is something that continues to be a major focus in the market. During the first day of the conference, the participants were able to listen to guest lectures about the electrification of vehicles and how hydraulic systems and components are adapted to the new conditions.

Florian Szabo, Design Engineer and Milad Khalafi, Associate Senior Engineer participated from Scania Sweden. Scania is extensively developing the electrification of its trucks and buses. Scania's goal is for more than 50 percent of its sales to be electric vehicles by 2030.

Robert Pettersson, Electrification Engineer at HIAB AB, talked about their electric-powered system ePTO and the development collaboration with Sunfab.

From HAWE Hydraulik in Germany, Lukas Hruby, Product Specialist and Tobias Kohler, Team Leader PM were on site and talked about the electrification of vehicles and its impact on hydraulics.

 

Dinner with the Northern Lights

The first day of the conference ended with a dinner where, in addition to food and entertainment, we had the opportunity to see a fantastic northern lights in the Swedish September night. A fantastic experience for our long-distance guests.

 

Sustainability at Sunfab

Since autumn 2020, Sunfab has conducted its sustainability work more systematically. By integrating sustainability work into the company's strategy, we strive for a sustainable value base to permeate the company's culture and relationship with the outside world.

At this year's SWC, Lina Wiberg, Quality Manager, Environment and Operational Development and Anna Sundin, Sustainability presented Sunfab's work on sustainability. In our industry, we see big differences in how far our customers and distributors have come in their sustainability work. We had interesting interactive discussions during the presentation which provided a further understanding of this topic.

By choosing a Sunfab product, our customers are not only buying a product, but are making a conscious decision to support a brand that is actively working towards a more sustainable future. Together, we can make a significant difference, one responsible choice at a time.

At Sunfab, that means:
• We provide fair employment conditions rooted in commitment, professionalism and respect.
• We power our production to 100 % with electricity sourced from renewable energy.
• 99.5% of the generated waste in the production is sorted and recycled back into circular material flows.
• We take pride in producing high-quality, long-lasting products that reduce the need for frequent replacements, ultimately conserving resources.
• We contribute with solutions for tomorrow’s electrified automotive systems.

 

The personal meetings are important

- SWC gives us a unique opportunity to both inform and train our distributors and our own organisation, says Per Olof Ohlsson, Sales and Marketing Director at Sunfab.
It's something that we place an incredibly high value on, this was especially important this year when we haven't met each other for a long time due to the pandemic.

You notice how important the personal meeting is. As a distributor, you often have contact with many different departments at Sunfab. Now there is a chance to meet several of the contacts you have and get to know them face to face. We have received a lot of positive feedback from the participants at this year's conference, concludes a satisfied Per Olof Ohlsson.