Hoppecke engineer Paul Moynihan; process and administration manager Natalie Bailey, and operations director - sales and service Stuart Browne.

Hoppecke Industrial Batteries has doubled its UK service business turnover in just three years.

This achievement is attributable in part to growth in Hoppecke UK's battery and charger rental business. A targeted campaign to highlight the advantages to businesses of all sizes of battery has seen orders rise from zero at start-up to several hundred rental batteries in 12 months.

Stuart Browne, operations director - sales and service at Hoppecke UK, says: "For logistics and warehousing operations, time is of the essence. Product availability coupled with our ability to turn around orders quickly has attracted support from major names in the forklift rental market as well as end-users, such as supermarkets."

Browne adds that rental agreements are tailored to individual customer needs and include topping up and servicing.

While most of its competitors build batteries in Europe, Hoppecke carries out assembly and holds large stocks of key products at its UK headquarters in Staffordshire. "Customers benefit from a fast turnaround - order to delivery is typically less than five working days," he says.

Another initiative which has boosted Hoppecke's service business is mobile chargers. Each engineer's van now contains two chargers as part of the standard equipment so, in situations where a customer's charger cannot be repaired, a loan charger is made available to help keep the customer's business operational.

With a team of 28 engineers across the UK, Hoppecke claims the largest directly employed team of skilled engineers in the industry. It is now recruiting to bring in additional technical expertise to support its successful new approach to meeting customer needs.