AAE uit Helmond is the best industrial supplier of the Netherlands in the category “Best Knowledge Supplier”. Masévon Technologies and Trios Precision Engineering ranked second. “This prize is a credit to all employees and our director William Pijnenburg, who died too early”, AAE director Frank Mulder said in an initial response. “He has laid out the lines, we have continued them. It feels very special to win such a prize.”
The prize was awarded last week as part of the annual presentation of the Dutch Industrial Supplier & Customer Awards (DISCA), an initiative of LINK Magazine in collaboration with ING Bank and ISAH Business Software. The jury is chaired by Professor Henk Volberda. A special feature of this contest is that companies can only be nominated by their suppliers or customers (and therefore cannot nominate themselves). In total there were 503 nominations.
In the Best Knowledge category, 20 companies survived the first screening because they had been nominated by two or more outsourcers. The decisive factor in this category is having your own R&D and engineering, with which suppliers add knowledge to the customer’s end product. After an extensive assessment, five finalists remained: Festo (Delft), Hemabo (Hengelo Ov) AAE (Helmond), Masévon Technology (Hardenberg) and Trios Precision Engineering (Neede). AAE, Masévon and Trios received the same high scores from the jury. As in previous years, the audience in the hall, consisting of entrepreneurs and managers, played a decisive role in the final choice of the winners. After three live pitches, the participants were able to vote for one candidate with their smartphone.
