Tamtron operates globally across the world and has country units in eight countries. All units bring their special know-how and personality to our company, so we want to showcase them more closely. The spotlight is first on Tamtron Sweden. We asked the Managing Director, Thomas Larsson, to tell us more.
”Tamtron Sweden has a well-established history in mobile weighing, and historically a strong position in Wheel Loader Scales. And this is actually where we come from”, says Larsson, who took over Tamtron AB as a Manager Director in 2014.
But the story of Tamtron Sweden starts already over three decades ago in 1989 when the company Bygginvest was founded by Acke Kandeman. In 1992 Bygginvest became the distributor of Tamtron and started introducing Wheel Loader Scales to the Swedish market. In 1999 the company changed its name to Vågab, and finally, in 2005 it was purchased by Tamtron.
”In 1995 the first verified Wheel Loader Scale was introduced in Sweden. Today, Tamtron has between 40–60 % of the total wheel loader market”, says Larsson and continues: ”In addition to this, we have a solid history on Timber Crane Scales as well. In 2010 we purchased another company that had developed a forest scale, Loadmaster timber scale, which was the forerunner of Tamtron Timber and the current intelligent ONE Timber scale.”
Solutions for waste management and heavy industry
Waste management and the whole industry is going through a change in many countries, and Sweden makes no exception to this.
In recent years Tamtron Sweden has expanded and reinforced the product offering especially to waste collection vehicles and heavy truck scales – products used by important customer groups already today.
”Here in Sweden, we have a waste hierarchy: first, you must prevent generating waste, then reuse the materials, recycle materials and parts, recover energy by burning the waste and finally, if nothing else works, deposit the waste. All these steps after reusing, require a market: buying, selling, and measuring. Weighing is the simplest solution to monitor and add traceability – and our customers understand this well”, Larsson explains.
”For heavy industries, our advantage has been our Motus system, which allows standard truck scale weighbridge to function as an automatic scale: each wheel axel is weighed when it rolls over the weighbridge. Together with One Scalex, we have a very good position here in Sweden. Motus serves as a special option for special needs, and One Scalex is the more general, mainstream choice.”
”All in all, we are in Sweden very focused on efficiency and removing man-hours. We want to automatize as much as we can. Customers are favouring cloud services and remote solutions very much. They are not so afraid of the cost of the solution, as they look at the overall costs. Our customers value our offering: high-end scales with cloud services.”
Solving the customer challenges
Larsson believes that the customer-centric view will be the core of Tamtron’s success in the future as well.
”The best part at Tamtron is that we are all very focused on solving the customer’s problem. We are working together to go forward, and all our employees make sure that the customer is satisfied. Today we have the technique and understanding of how we can set up systems which support the customers’ operations. We are now looking at the way we can redesign our local support department. The idea is to develop both in-house and on-site training set-up, where we can train and support the customer”, he says.
Future is all about information
So, what does the future of Tamtron Sweden look like? Larsson has a clear vision for the upcoming years: ”It’s information that is needed and that is valuable. We continue to collect usable information and will probably offer more information services in the future. We could for example sell traffic data and big data. Municipalities could for instance start having bins that inform a few days before that they should be collected.
I also think that if we could convince our national road administrator, we could offer heavy truck scales with the automatic weighing solution on every hundred kilometres on the national roads. And with police control checking points making sure the regulations are met. This would be possible, as the technique is already there.”
Larsson also sees that autonomous working machines are the next big thing, which needs attention in the field: ”For example, we already have these semiautomatic machines in mines, which are controlled from remote control rooms. However, they are run by operators. It’s the full-automatic machines that are the challenge. You must position them and let the scale know when the loading is completed, what is loaded and when.
But all in all, knowledge is what we promote hard. I encourage customers to use our expertise – we are here for them”, concludes Larsson.
Fact box:
Did you know? – Five facts about Tamtron Sweden
- Tamtron Sweden is headquartered in the same city, as it was founded in, Karlstad
- The first Tamtron heavy truck scale was sold in 2013
- Since 2009 Wnexus is used as a standard in the mining district
- Around 100–150 new scales are installed in Sweden annually.
- 750 scales are connected to Wnexus today