LST Group

LST Group on course for expansion

The owner-managed, internationally operating LST Group serves the agriculture, construction and industry markets with premium quality products and services - made in Germany. Its brands and business operations range from accessory equipment and tools, machines for construction, agriculture and industry, through to energy and environmental technology. The Group has its own production facilities, service and sales branches in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland and Mexico. The strategic center and head office of LST is located in Herrsching am Ammersee in Upper Bavaria.

LST is a young company founded in 2001 by managing partner Michael Schwienbacher (since 2003 as LST GmbH) and within a 10 year period has developed from a medium-sized regional operation to an international player. Today, the LST Group employs a workforce of over 200 at 16 production sites in five countries throughout Central Europe.

In addition to being on course for expansion in Europe, the LST Group is also progressively addressing the Russian, American and African markets.

Flexibility, uncompromising performance and 100% commitment

Hydraulic hammers, pulverizers, demolition shears, grippers and bucket crushers are just some of the more than 450 products that LST positions in its various markets. According to the company itself, its recipe for success is to combine high-performance, innovative products with the best possible services.

As a full-liner, the parent company, LST GmbH, provides a wide range of attachment equipment for construction machines including numerous product variations; moreoever, new developments, innovations, alterations or extensions from all production sites are added almost on a daily basis.

What is more, the LST Group recognized early on that companies nowadays are involved in global competition not just in terms of products, but also in terms of communication. For this reason, measures were taken to integrate the various communication instruments, thereby supporting faster, simpler input of communicative messages across all channels.

"We opted for censhare in order to remain on course for growth and be in a position to utilize and save all information effectively," says entrepreneur Michael Schwienbacher in interview (http://bit.ly/LSTgroup), in which he captures in a nutshell the company's motives for making this strategic investment in an integrated communication solution: "German medium-sized companies are increasingly gearing themselves to operating in a perfectionist, cost-optimized manner. Here, a central database which automatically provides translations and other output to a range of digital, print and Internet media is the right option to remain internationally competitive, as we see it."

The first project realized with censhare was a multilingual catalog showing the LST product program and service portfolio.

Always close to the customer

The LST Group now uses censhare in almost all areas of external communication: the international product catalog, a diverse range of data sheets and the company website. A PIM (Product Information System) serves as the central instance for communication measures - a virtual product catalog containing all technical specifications and product features.

By means of an integrated media database it is possible to handle product texts, images, sketches and videos in channel-specific variations and different language versions. These can then be retrieved and integrated into various types of media via the Enterprise Content Management System.

The LST Group not only distinguishes between product groups, product classes, products, series and weight classes, but also countless technical details. All this has to be processed and managed in eight different languages, including Chinese, Russian, Polish, Czech, Spanish and Hungarian. censhare Translation Management is integrated so that both external translation service providers and the various business divisions and sites can be efficiently linked into processes, workflows and approval routines.

Global publishing

»"We chose censhare because the approach really is global", says David Bernhart, Team Leader Media Digital/Print.

LST Group attaches particular importance to the centralized yet cross-media approach offered by censhare. The stated aim was to implement an efficient system by means of which all publications and communication media could be prepared from an integrated and scaled database in highly standardized form for all output media and channels - and allowing administration and operation both centrally and peripherally. Here, particular attention was paid to a central production environment for all print products and the website.

According to David Bernhart, this is the only way to ensure that "up-and-coming, active, internationally active medium-sized companies are able to communicate and publish in a sustainable, cost-effective and highly flexible manner".

The integrated solution for print, web and mobile allows visuals, data tables, articles, product information sheets, advertising messages and also design templates, navigation structures and the entire website to be handled and utilized out of a central database for all media forms and channels. In this way, the LST Group now manages, produces and administers its website and print media using a central content pool from a single system. This is a huge advantage offered by censhare as compared to pure WebCMS systems - a key factor in the Group's decision to opt for censhare. What is more, all product versions can be efficiently administered in censhare using a new XML-based table editor on a media-neutral basis for all forms of output, ensuring that all media types and language versions are fully up to date.

As part of the LST Group's newly developed multi-brand strategy, the next stage will be apply these functionalities to other business divisions.

Growth and internationalization

An investment in software is always an investment in processes and workflows. In growth and in corporate change. Processes can be made much more efficient and lean. Growth and internationalization are strategic goals for the LST Group. "In this context" , says the innovative entrepreneur, "censhare is an important and necessary aspect for us to be able to continue to grow, extend the supply program and ensure expansion from 300 to 500 staff."

www.lst-anbaugeraete.de