The event started with lunch, followed by a review of the past financial year. Thomas Diringer, responsible for ViscoTec’s microdispensing brand, preeflow, opened the discussion with information about preeflow’s 11th year: To date, the market leader in volumetric dispensing has sold more than 20,000 dispensers.

Such a step is only feasible together with ambitious and long-term partners. Thomas Diringer emphasized this clearly and thanked the international guests.  "Our strengths include many years of experience, quick support, total reliability and fast delivery times. This distinguishes us from our competitors, and we want to continue to build on this in the future," said Diringer in Unterneukirchen. This statement was also underlined by the distributors’ praise for preeflow with regard to the product portfolio and in particular the availability of the products and support. According to the participants, these points represent a clear advantage over the market competitors.

Despite intensifying competition, preeflow, together with its partners, wants to continuously strengthen its existing market position. "The increasing competitive situation clearly shows how much potential there is in this industry and that the market is far from saturated," Diringer continues. "The long-term goal is to further strengthen and expand preeflow’s market position as THE brand in the field of microdispensing technology based on progressive cavity pump technology ­ also in completely new areas of application.

Next to a preview of the already planned extension of the portfolio, a survey was also carried out in order to be able to consider the wishes and suggestions of the partners for further cooperation and to improve the long-term collaboration. A questionnaire was used to include topics such as product portfolio and service, current market situation, potential future areas of application and many more topics. This activity was met with great interest among the participants. After the evaluation, the preeflow team will develop appropriate measures and implement them as soon as possible.

As well as presentations on current application examples, an overview of the current competitive situation, the potential of future areas and technologies and other current topics was extensively discussed. The potential is very promising for both preeflow and its parent brand, ViscoTec. There was a lot of interest, for example, in the topic of autonomous driving, to which a separate presentation was dedicated.

The participants were particularly positive about the exchange of information between the distributors: They discussed technical difficulties and shared their own solutions in different areas in which the partners are active together – but regionally separated.

Topics such as improvement potential, both product- and organization-related, and possible solutions for a more continuous exchange with each other were also discussed. Direct discussions often open up new approaches for additional applications. An important finding of the day was that the world is becoming more complex and networked, and that customers are often large international corporations. In the future, preeflow partners will have to focus even more on the needs of the end user. This requires the agreement of all distributors, as well as the headquarters, to find a suitable solution for everyone.

After this informative day, the evening ended with a casual "dinner" and a game of skittles. All in all, preeflow received very positive feedback from its partners and exciting suggestions for future distributor meetings. Despite the increasingly complex market environment, the team is looking positively towards a successful future.