Glaston Celebrates 40 Years Service to Insulating Glass Customers
In July, Glaston celebrated the milestone of reaching 40 years providing services to customers worldwide from Insulating Glass Services. Today, this team offers lifecycle support with original spare parts, continuous maintenance, upgrades and more to keep customers operating at peak performance. Alumni and current Services representatives met at a special event to celebrate the four-decade milestone and review the success of Glaston’s Insulating Glass service operations.
The Service department got its start in 1983 under the leadership of founder Karl Lenhardt of Lenhardt Maschinenbau, later Bystronic Lenhardt which Glaston acquired in 2019. The department was set up to provide support for their increasingly popular Insulating Glass lines.
The idea of creating a Service department sprang from the need to alleviate the workload of the construction team. At that time, customers who experienced problems with their machines or needed spare parts were reaching out directly to their contacts in the company’s construction department.
Jürgen Arnold, the first dedicated employee in the Services team, recalls that everything had to be built up from scratch. “We built up our Service organization the way we envisioned it and did everything on our own initiative, relying on our colleagues with long-term experience in assembling and commissioning the machines.”
Current Services Director Elmar Volkert says they offered the first teleservice and transmitted programs in the late 1980s with a telephone receiver in a bowl and a 56-k modem. “Today’s communication options and online tools have helped us make a quantum leap, making our work much easier and allowing us to connect to our customer’s machines much faster.”