Award-Winning Remanufacturing: Engine Innovation from Hetzel GmbH

You may not have heard of Hetzel GmbH. They are a small specialist family business in Germany and recently found themselves as winners of the TOP100 award in Germany for innovation. And we think they deserve your attention. Why? They remanufacture transmissions and have discovered so many ways of improving the original equipment designs that German (OEM) manufacturers have been sending their designers to visit and train at Hetzel’s. The youthful OEM designers discover what happened to the transmissions designed by their older colleagues. Which parts wore and which parts failed - and why? This tells us all something important about engineering culture in Germany. Let’s acknowledge a deep-seated curiosity about quality and performance and a respect for anyone with unique knowledge about the real world performance of components… even when the company involved is an SME and the OEM is a global giant.

This small specialist company is staffed by people who want to return transmissions to service that are ‘BetterThanNew’. And it is the cooperation between OEMs and Hetzel GmbH that makes all the difference. For OEMs that see the potential from this culture, we are building the European Remanufacturing Council. Join in so that we can celebrate many more companies like Hetzel GmbH in the future.