20 Years of Apex Dynamics BV: Quality as a foundation
Apex Dynamics BV is blowing out twenty candles. A milestone where we not only look back on the past 20 years but also look forward with confidence to what is to come. The arrival of Stef van Oss, three and a half years ago, marked the beginning of a new phase. He joined with a clear mandate to prepare the organization for the future. The result? A company that revolves entirely around quality and data. In this article, we discuss with Stef how this came about and where he believes the company is headed.
“After twenty years of building, we are now at a point where, still with our small and agile team, we are ready to take the next big leap. In recent years, we have laid a foundation where quality is no longer just in heads or folders but is fully anchored in our systems. This gives us the peace and strength to immediately embrace every new innovation from our factory in Taiwan and deliver it to the customer with our well-known lightning-fast response. We have now secured the processes so that we are truly ready for the next twenty years.”
Stef van Oss started at Apex Dynamics in the spring of 2023. He consciously sought a place where he could roll up his sleeves and put his education in Business Management for SMEs and the experience he gained at a start-up into practice. At Apex Dynamics, he was given a challenging assignment:
“What appealed to me enormously was the small team, the quick decision-making, and the variety of tasks. Sales one day, in the warehouse the next, and visiting a customer the day after; that is exactly what I studied for. Additionally, it seemed great to take some significant steps together with my father. The speed with which we can get things done here and the impact you can make in various areas—whether it’s sales, logistics, or marketing—is reflected almost immediately in the results.”
Digitization and quality assurance
“When I look back to the moment I started, I saw an organization that did its work as it had developed over the past fifteen years. There was digitization, but it was mainly an addition to how work was done manually. We worked a lot with paper, folders, and handwritten notes. Our ERP system was more of a tool for the paper workflow than the guiding principle. The system would create an order confirmation, which was printed and then literally entered the paper system. That worked fantastically in essence, but it made collaboration difficult because responsibility for specific tasks often lay with one person. If you had to step in or take over, it was sometimes a search. That had to change, and that became my assignment on day one.”
The assignment to professionalize was concrete, but the underlying thought was even more important: securing the constant quality for which Apex Dynamics is known. Apex Dynamics decided not to view ISO 9001 certification as a “paper tiger,” but as a lever to scrutinize the entire business operation and anchor the quality standard in the systems.
“With the ISO trajectory, I could literally walk through the entire organization to see how everything was running. Previously, everything had grown with the times, but processes were often closed ‘one-man systems.’ Someone would handle sales administration in their own way, and if a second person joined, you quickly lost the overview. Everything was recorded in a folder that sat physically behind someone’s desk. It was very difficult as a colleague to access it without disrupting that process. Too much had to happen physically to be able to interfere with a system.”
The goal was an ‘internal revolution’ where quality was no longer dependent on individual actions but on a watertight system. This ensured that the well-known service level remained intact while the back end was fully professionalized.
“Once we had mapped out all the processes, we redesigned them from the ground up, making exclusive use of systems we already had. In fact, no new systems were added; we just started making optimal use of what we already had in-house to guarantee that quality. We started relying on the ‘paperless’ part. That was a necessary internal professionalization. For the customer, nothing has changed at the front end—the service has remained equally high—but internally we have started working much more efficiently, and the error margin has been reduced to a minimum.”
Ready for the next twenty years
After three and a half years of hard work, the transformation is visible. Apex Dynamics BV is now an organization where knowledge and quality no longer reside in heads or folders, but in a secured system. This provides peace and continuity: even when new people join the team, the output remains at the highest conceivable level.
“We have now recorded the processes within the company and we audit annually whether this still aligns with what we actually do. It’s about quality assurance of data and the primary process: from inquiry to quote, delivery, invoicing, and service. We have anchored that so well now that two or three people can work on the same process without information becoming fragmented or quality being compromised. New colleagues can also be trained faster and in the right way because of this. I think we are now at the point where, still with a small team, we can take the next step of twenty years. We are really ready for it.”
The drive with which Thom and Eric have been storming the market for twenty years is still the fuel of the company, although the form has changed into an organization that breathes quality at every level, not just speed.
“We all share the passion for the company here. Just like Thom and Eric, I am in it with a lot of spirit and love. We take the work seriously and enjoy pushing hard. Where we stand now is the result of twenty years of building, but the professionalization of recent years ensures that we now have the foundation for the coming years to maintain that quality and growth.”
A Look at the future: getting product data to customers rapidly
Apex Dynamics has always been 100% focused on its customers, and even more time becomes available for that when all internal processes occur flawlessly and automatically. This also creates room for innovation, because in a world where everything revolves around speed and integration, Stef sees a new role for Apex Dynamics. The product is no longer just the hardware from Taiwan, but also the data that accompanies it.
“Our factory in Taiwan continues to develop at a rapid pace, and we have everything in-house to keep up. Whatever new products or series are introduced from Taiwan in the coming years, our organization is set up to pick this up quickly. But the real gain for the coming years lies in the findability and availability of our documentation and specifications. We want to remain at the forefront of how we offer our data. We want customers to be able to seamlessly integrate our products not only physically but also digitally into their systems and processes. We already offer a lot of information via our website and, for example, the new Quickfinder [a tool that rapidly searches more than 55,000 gearbox configurations], but I dream of, for instance, an end-to-end connection. A kind of Apex API where customers can load our product data directly into their own systems. I don’t know what that will look like yet, but we are working hard to make all that data fully available so that customers can engineer and act even faster. By unlocking that information to the maximum, we make ourselves an indispensable link in the customer’s process. That is where the technological gain lies for the coming years. And of course, we will maintain our lightning-fast response and delivery times. This means customers can act extremely quickly when working with Apex Dynamics products. I don’t think I need to explain how valuable that is anymore.”
