Extreme quality consciousness

Viking, a manufacturer of lawnmowers, shredders and hand-held garden equipment, demands high standards of its own products and of its retail partners as well
A member of the Waiblingen-based German Stihl group of companies since 1992, Viking was founded eleven years previous to this by Heinrich Lechner and headquartered in Kufstein. The year 1992 also saw Dr Nikolas Stihl, grandson of Stihl’s founder, take over management of the company.
Abroad is where the profit comes from – the ratio of exports to total sales amounts to 99 per cent. The greater part of these sales goes to France, followed by Germany. The company regards itself as the market leader for lawnmowers in France and for shredders in Greece. It is also investing in eastern Europe. The company’s catalogue is already available in 28 different languages, and there is a distributive organisation in each of the 55 countries exported to. At headquarters in Kufstein there is a staff of 150 on average, about half of them on the production side.
Up to 3 500 products leave the production facility every day.
Quality assurance has top priority at Viking. Each tool is provided with a bar code sticker so that the entire production sequence can be traced from the selling stage right back to the start. Use is made of a four-acre field right next to the factory for exhaustive practical tests. Linked to it is a 100 m2 pavilion plus showroom, which is visited by 1 000 dealers from all over the world every year. This is because Viking sells its products exclusively to specialist dealers, who are able to service the tools and are mainly garden centre owners or machinery specialists.
Green is the colour of Viking’s company livery.
In the main season up to 3 500 products leave the production floor every day. Five assembly lines produce lawnmowers, one produces shredders, and one more turns out hand-held power tools, some for the parent company Stihl as well. Every tool undergoes a computerised functional test to complete the process. Manufacturing is customer-responsive, i.e. geared to the monthly planning of the retail organisations, which considerably reduces storage costs. Warehousing, with over 4 000 pallet bays and 15000 storage slots, is limited to raw materials and spare parts, plus a small number of finished parts.