Page 11 - Mobility Management, January 2018

organization will represent the combined portfolio of ROHO and Comfort Company seating and positioning products in the U.S. This will be a complementary sales team to the traditional Permobil Mobility sales force responsible for power and manual wheelchairs, so
those two sales organizations will in effect be sister sales organizations in the U.S., one focused on mobility solutions, one focused on seating and positioning solutions.”
Comfort Company products will also become more readily available outside the United States.
“Comfort Company has had very little active export business, and the ROHO range of products for export has been a very successful business for us,” Borcherding noted. “Being able to add Comfort Company products to our portfolio for international markets is just going to make the products available to solve many more seating needs around the world, which is a goal of ours.”
Permobil is also looking to streamline operations inter- nally, so more ROHO- and Comfort Company-branded products are available to ship with Permobil and TiLite wheelchair orders.
“More ROHO and Comfort Company products will
be available to order with Permobil and TiLite chairs,” Borcherding said. “That is in effect today for many ROHO products, including the AGILITY back line, and Comfort Company products will be added to that mix of products available to order with the chair. That is a priority action, scheduled for start-up in the early part of 2018.”
Continuing Education Goals
Prior to the acquisition, Comfort Company had invested heavily in clinical education, bringing on educators to speak at industry events and write articles shared via newsletters and the Comfort Company Web site.
The emphasis on education will continue, Murphy said.
“This is another synergy and one of the exciting developments: that our clinical team has remained in place and will continue to create [educational] content, create the blog posts and create materials to support the clinical community, and not just on the rehab side, but also on the long-term care side of the business,”
he said. “Already, they’re interacting with some of the resources that Permobil has in place, on the research side of things, on how we as an organization are going to support our customer base globally better than we ever have before from the clinical and education side.”
Comfort Company also has a positive reputation for being able to quickly identify new product needs and promptly design and manufacture new components.
“You’ve seen the innovation that’s come from Comfort Company, speci cally in terms of a lot of activity in new products and new product categories in seating and positioning,” Borcherding said. “It’s been a very active innovation and product development process. We want to bring that energy and activity into our complete seating and positioning organization, and we are struc- turing our management teams around products and innovation based on that success at Comfort Company. So, I do think this will spur more innovation from Permobil Seating and Positioning, and we’ll see the results of
that probably as early as ISS [International Seating Symposium] 2018.”
Murphy said Comfort Company products in develop- ment during the acquisition will move forward.
“One thing that you’re going to see a lot more of
is Comfort Company being added into the portfolio, additional back offerings, accessory offerings, a broader range of custom seating solutions, then as
Tom mentioned, more innovation in all those categories coming in the new year,” he said. “A lot of those projects that were in the works were a perfect t for Permobil,
for TiLite, and integrate perfectly into the current ROHO offerings. Nothing has changed there.”
Fortifying the Flagship
Borcherding said Comfort Company is strengthening the Permobil Seating and Positioning division that was born when the wheelchair manufacturer acquired ROHO more than two years ago.
“At that time, the goal was to start building the Seating and Positioning organization under the Permobil ag- ship,” he said. “Now, the continuing evolution of that goal is to build a globally leading seating and positioning organization. And to do that, we need more top-brand products, more variety in our product line, more expan- sion of our product portfolio. Comfort Company was the number-one target for a partner that would allow us to take a great leap forward in that goal.
“When ROHO and Comfort Company products were competing, they certainly had our attention: Comfort Company was very agile, very responsive to customer requests to produce new and innovative products more frequently than others in the industry were doing. That’s certainly a core part of the Comfort Company culture that we want to retain and support. Going forward, we’re going to nd what each of us does best to the bene t of our customers around the world.” m
— Laurie Watanabe
MobilityMgmt.com
MOBILITY MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2018 11