Walzpunkt AG

Walzpunkt keeps the chocolate industry's roll refiners running. On these machines cocoa mass passes between five rolls until it is fine enough to melt on the tongue. Many of them come from Bühler…

• Client: Walzpunkt AG
• Built by: Orbit (Jan, Marcel)
• Period: 2026

Walzpunkt keeps the chocolate industry's roll refiners running. On these machines cocoa mass passes between five rolls until it is fine enough to melt on the tongue. Many of them come from Bühler, bear names like Stoos, Rigi and Säntis and have been running for decades, day and night.

If a control fails in such a line, production stops, and the original parts have long since disappeared from the market. For over three decades, this has been the moment when the phone rings in Reichenburg. In 2026, Walzpunkt AG decides to make this knowledge visible and to restructure its business. Together with Orbit, they create a single app for both: the website that operators of rolling mills across Europe will find, and the workshop that handles the daily routine from the first call to the paid invoice. The same address, the same design, the same data.

• Website in four languages with catalog, data sheets and inquiry • Ordering process from product to order confirmation • Orders, nine document types and Swiss QR invoice • Planning, billing and evaluation • Warehouse with journal, machines and maintenance • Circuit diagrams according to IEC 60617 • Customer search in open business registers of Europe • AI on Orbits own graphics card in Switzerland

We make rollers.

The new walzpunkt.ch speaks like its technicians: short, calm, confident. Dark like a workshop at night, with gold like the light over the line, and with a single sentence as a greeting. Below follow the key figures of the operation and the four services Retrofit, Maintenance, preventive maintenance and Repair.

Anyone who opens the page in the workshop hall on their phone gets the same order in a single column, with a dedicated portrait-oriented image crop, and is just one tap away from the technician's phone. The website and the workshop share one design: whoever opens the orders in the morning works in the same layout that customers see on the website.

Four languages, one voice

walzpunkt.ch speaks German, French, English and Italian, with the switch right next to the request on the left. French has been there from day one, because many rolling mills are located in the Romandie and in France. Technical terms remain those of the industry in every language: A rolling mill is a rolling mill of the chocolate industry, not a steel mill.

Each of the 35 public products has its own texts in every language, which Walzpunkt maintains in the language workshop, language by language. For 26 products, the data sheet is available in all four languages, with identical figures, based on the manufacturers' documents. The website links to these documents instead of copying them. Company and product flyers are ready for print, and each product prints as a clean A4 page.

To be found

A website for such a narrow industry lives on the right people finding it. walzpunkt.ch loads in under three seconds, scores 95 out of 100 points in Google's performance test and weighs less than 600 kilobytes. Titles, questions and company data are placed in the page so that search engines and AI assistants can read them.

Six weeks after launch, Google indexes 58 of the 152 addresses of the website, the search for Walzpunkt AG in Reichenburg ranks first, and the product pages appear in positions two to four. All 35 products of the shop are published in the Google business profile. The mail from walzpunkt.ch is secured with the sender checks SPF, DKIM and DMARC, at the strictest level against forgeries.

Parts that no longer exist

The core of the catalog is the Walzboard. The original relay boards from the rolling mills have been unavailable for years, so Walzpunkt designed a functionally identical, reinforced board: eight high-performance relays, one LED per channel, the same connectors, the same pinout. Disconnect three connectors, swap the board, snap it in. After ten to fifteen minutes, the machine is running again, and old switching problems are a thing of the past.

Alongside this, an entire family is growing: the PSU 1 replaces the old power supplies that heat up entire control cabinets, and is stronger, more stable, and significantly cooler in the process. The Walz-Block bundles 24 relays, freely accessible within the machine. ERD controls return with new keyboards, displays, and films, and are tested at elevated temperatures before they go back into a line. Two generations are ready for immediate replacement.

Five to eight seconds

Some products are more than a replacement part. The dry run protection TLS completely replaces the old SEL and SELA systems: Two infrared cameras check the chocolate film on the top roller. If it tears off, the machine stops after five to eight seconds, before the rollers run dry. Two laser sensors monitor the feed and control the flap. Two technicians install the system in a few days, and the line is down for about two days for that.

At the very top is the Retrofit Max: the complete overhaul of a five-roll mill for about a quarter of the price of a new machine. The mechanics, which have held up for decades, remain. Everything that thinks is new: control, operation, sensors, with Siemens LOGO! and a touch panel that a human understands without a manual.

A catalog that leads to conversation

With machines of this kind, every business begins with a conversation, so every position in the catalog leads directly to the technician. The categories separate own products, repairs, modern control components, and the complete overhaul, and each product has its own address with photos, key data, price, and data sheet. Whoever searches on Google for a replacement for an ERD relay board ends up in Reichenburg.

Ordering without detours

Right next to the inquiry, the path to direct ordering is ready. As long as products are in view, an order form waits at the bottom edge, growing with the selection. From it, an order is submitted, which becomes a job in the workshop, and a person checks it before the order confirmation goes out. The promise on the page is simple: You will usually receive our order confirmation on the next working day.

The rules are those of a business that works with businesses: only business customers, in Switzerland and Liechtenstein in francs, in Germany, Austria and France in euros with reverse charge of tax and obligation to provide a tax number. New customers also pay on invoice, shipping costs are set by Walzpunkt during the review, and what is not in stock remains orderable, with delivery time on request. A product without a price becomes a draft of a quote, a mixed list becomes a single order. The entire path has been tested twice in the real operation, and Walzpunkt activates it when the moment is right.

The Order at the Center

Behind the website is the workshop, and in it everything is subordinated to the order. The Overview shows in the morning what is open, what is lying on the workbench, which modules are ready in the warehouse and what was delivered this week. A phone call becomes an order with a single move, with customer, machine and topic, and appears immediately in the list, sorted by what matters right now: in progress, waiting for a part, ready for billing.

The order itself contains symptoms, notes, and the machine with its year of manufacture and last maintenance. Every hour on the line is recorded in the workshop log with a code and duration, and every installed part is drawn from the warehouse. From this, the service report is generated with one click, including work by person, material, and daily reports. An order can be duplicated as a complete copy, and the parts are selected directly from the inventory.

Nine pieces of evidence, a chain

The order becomes the document chain. Nine document types each have their own number sequence, and all are generated in the Walzpunkt template and as a PDF at the push of a button, with the page count checked before dispatch. The same billing logic provides the amounts for the PDF, the document, the settlement, and the invoice, including currency, reversal of tax liability, and discount.

Every invoice carries a Swiss QR invoice with a structured reference. The delivery note knows the tariff number and weights, while work remains excluded from the customs declaration. The warehouse moves with the documents: a delivery note books out, a credit note books back, and a deleted document takes its movements with it.

Which workbench receives what when is shown in the Planning: the week as a board from Monday to Friday, with the capacity of the workbenches, the orders without a deadline, and a calendar for the whole month. If a part is missing for an order, the parts replenishment suggests the order to the appropriate supplier, as a finished email.

What the numbers say

The billing shows every outstanding franc, ready on a board, categorized as open, overdue, and paid. The system suggests the dunning letters itself, first the payment reminder, then the second, and finally the final dunning letter, and one click creates them. The evaluation puts monthly revenue, the age structure of debtors, hours per person, and upcoming maintenance on one page.

Warehouses, machines, circuit diagrams

The Module Warehouse stores each refurbished module with its serial number, storage location, test date and price, alongside the individual parts with stock levels, minimum quantities and suppliers. Every movement is a line in the journal, and delivery notes from suppliers are read and matched against the order numbers, instead of being typed in.

The machine register knows every managed line, calculates the next maintenance from the last one, and «Plan maintenance» turns it into an order. For the controls, there is a circuit diagram editor based on IEC 60617: plans come in via import, and each component becomes a symbol from its own library.

Purchasing also has its order. Every incoming invoice is recorded in the creditors journal, with account, expense type and due date, and every supplier delivery note is checked line by line before the goods are posted to the warehouse.

On the line

When a technician faces a silent line, he opens the Deployment Mode: a view designed exclusively for on the go, large, dark and operable with the thumb. At the top, it shows what is important right now, from due maintenance to scarce parts. A tap on the machine opens its console with circuit diagrams, history, documents, knowledge, chat and photos, all related to this single line.

What the workshop knows, lies in the knowledge: manuals, data sheets, test protocols and notes, linked to machine, type, module or product. This way, exactly the documents that match each line appear at every line, and what a technician finds out today is available to everyone tomorrow.

Find customers

Customers and suppliers each have their own base, with contacts, rolling mills, open items and a classification from A to E. And the workshop also searches on its own: A search run takes target industries such as chocolate, confectionery, cosmetics, mills, paints or coffee and queries the open company registers, the commercial registers of Switzerland and Germany, the registers of France, Great Britain and Norway, plus open card and knowledge data.

Each lead shows its distance to the workshop, Walzpunkt marks its interest on a scale from one to five, and in the lead window a draft for the first message is ready, in a tone matching the stage and in the language of the country. Only a human turns a candidate into a customer.

Anyone who wants to know what is currently running asks WalzChat, the AI assistant that answers based on the workshop's data. All AI functions run on a model on Orbit's own graphics card in Switzerland. Delivery notes from suppliers are read by text recognition entirely without a language model, in German and English.

Post in your own style

The emails also look like Walzpunkt. Seven types of shop and receipt emails go out in the style of the website, on a dark background and with the button that customers know from the site, from the sender contact@walzpunkt.ch and signed for the own domain. Invoices and dunning letters are deliberately sent further by the team from their own mail program, as Walzpunkt had requested.

Real data from day one

On September 22, the business moved in: the lists from Walzpunkt with inventory and supplier invoices, checked, cleaned up and with a single notation per supplier including branches. Since then, the workshop has been running only on real data. Images and documents are stored in Walzpunkt's own storage, not in the code.

Continue

walzpunkt.ch has been online since September 2, 2026, the workshop has been in daily use since summer and is growing with each month: the chain of custody, QR invoice, data sheets, languages, ordering process, circuit diagram import and customer search were added during ongoing operations. Next, the workshop will assign incoming payments to invoices itself via the QR reference. Walzpunkt shows what software can achieve when it is built like the craft it serves: robust, honest, repairable. The rollers keep running, and so does the workshop.