Grüter Suter Kaffeemaschinen AG is replacing years of Excel-based service planning with a single ToolSense platform for ticketing, maintenance data and technician planning, with a company-wide rollout underway.
Grüter Suter Kaffeemaschinen AG is a Swiss coffee-machine company serving hospitality, care homes, hospitals and corporate customers. Fabian Ruiz runs the business as CEO. The team services customer machines on site, carries out preventive maintenance and operates an emergency-service organisation for the installed base.
The starting point
For years, Grüter Suter planned its work with the classic Excel sheets familiar to most companies. After introducing a new ERP system about four years ago, together with digital reporting, the team quickly realised that planning needed its own digitalisation: ERP is built for accounting, and reporting covered only part of the picture. Meeting customers' expectations on regularity and on-time service was getting harder to manage by hand. For a small company, taking on mobile data capture and reporting was a "mammoth project," and planning had been somewhat neglected.
The technical and customer-service lead, together with an IT specialist, dug deep into online research and demo versions, and kept coming back to ToolSense. After presenting it internally, the management team decided to take that path.
Why ToolSense
Onboarding was real work. Master data exported from the ERP wasn't in the shape it needed to be, so the team invested heavily in cleaning it up before importing. With support from ToolSense's Manuel, they then adapted the field-service tool to their needs, accepting that it's not a "wish concert": you adjust your own processes too, so the whole thing makes sense. A test phase with two technicians and the administration produced the insights needed to enable a full rollout.
For us the tool is not a solution, it's an aid to raising quality, and that's what we have to use it for.
Fabian Ruiz · CEO, Grüter Suter Kaffeemaschinen AG
Operational impact
The rollout is happening this month: the whole organisation will plan, ticket and manage maintenance data in ToolSense, and the old ticketing system will be retired. The two headline goals are efficiency and planning reliability, giving staff a single, trustworthy source instead of scattered data, phone numbers and addresses. The aim is to use resources better, not to cut them, and to free up time, the thing that always gets in the way of looking after customers. Ruiz also expects ToolSense to support electrical testing documentation and even holiday and capacity planning for staff.
What's next
Ruiz sees the asset history and maintenance planning becoming a single information platform for technicians and administration, so nothing lands in an Excel sheet and vanishes. His advice to others: treat the tool as an aid, not a finished answer, keep the people who use it thinking about improvements, and keep the dialogue with the vendor going. Looking further out, the goal both sides share is the machine that calls for service itself, telemetry and IoT raising a ticket automatically rather than waiting for the customer to phone in.
