Details of our project Automechnika-CATpool with Messe Frankfurt

These details and background information will help you to better understand our concepts and experiences from Automechnika-CATpool and Messe Frankfurt. We prefer a very open word and if you are in the exhibition business yourself you can learn from competitor's mistakes, which is the only thing in business that comes for free.

From 1997 until 2006 our German sister company had a very successful co-operation with Messe Frankfurt GmbH for Automechanika-CATpool, a new electronic product catalog system for exhibitor catalogs and data, which was distributed on CD-ROM to visitors of the Automechanika exhibition and which was also available on the Internet.

The "permanent virtual exhibition" was all our idea

It was all based on our own ideas of a "permanent virtual exhibition" with e-paper catalog and data exchange pool, on our oncepts and on our software that already existed since 1993 although it was then only a small fragment of today's software family. The responsible Geschäftsführer of Messe Frankfurt in 1997, Raimund Hosch, saw our project as some kind of an internal competition to the very much larger and more expensive web projects based on a database product catalog that they had started while being infected by the euphoria of the Internet bubble.

We warned our partners from the very beginning that an exhibition alone will not be reason enough for exhibitors as data vendors to prepare, upload and regularly maintain their detailed data for some central server. We also correctly predicted that they would never succeed in establishing this as a trading portal charging commissions.

Exhibitor e-paper catalog and data pool

More than 300.000 CD-ROM with Automechanika-CATpool were distributed starting in 1998 to visitors of the Automechanika in Frankfurt am Main, the world's largest automotive parts and garage equipment exhibition.

The idea was to build up an information system essentially identical to today's CATpool but with a much smaller focus limited to the distribution of exhibitor paper catalogs in our e-paper format Elecat and connected to a product database of (less detailed) product data. This was based on a special version of our Elecat software.

Beyond this, we wanted to achieve multiple re-use of this data in daily business with local software and the re-use of paper catalogs in e-paper by the trade. Also, we wanted it all to be extended beyond exhibitors and visitors to become the one data and catalog exchange portal website for the entire automotive industry world-wide.

The ideas were right, the market had accepted it but marketing and sales were non-existent after the 1998 fair.

CATpool was more successful than their Internet projects for all other exhibitions combined

In the first year 1998 we made the sales on behalf of Messe Frankfurt and we made more turn-over than all of their other exhibition projects combined with their own web projects. CATpool was profitable from the very beginning.

Automechnika-CATpool was their only ever successful web project with instant operational profits although it was never really marketed and sold properly after the 1998 fair, because other departments in Messe Frankfurt and also the Geschäftsführer soon feared our competition for their own portal and database projects. That was also the reason why we were not allowed to implement some essential features to achieve even more success.

CATpool had the potential to become more profitable than the exhibition itself

Our business plan showed that CATpool had the potential to become more profitable than the Automechanika exhibition itself after a few years and our figures were approved to be realistic or even too conservative by an expert inside Messe Frankfurt who knew all the internal figures that we could only estmate for our business plan.

Jealousy is often stronger than success — or how to kill a successful project

Several people in Messe Frankfurt were unpleasantly surprised of our success and did not like this result at all, especially since their own activities failed and were quickly given up. Their own projects had cost multiple times more and they all failed desperately (as we told them before). They lost many millions of DM on their illusions and false assumptions and the Geschäftsführer who was in charge of this debacle left Messe Frankfurt (had to ???).

The essential reasons for their misconcepts and failures are explained here. It's important to understand them!

Our project was never appreciated by the Gechäftsführer and by other departments, simply because we were an independent partner, we owned the software and we had brought in all the concepts and their experience proved that their concepts were wrong while we proved our's to be right and a great success.

Our only full supporter was the long-time director of Automechnika, Horst Niedlich. He was also the only person to fully understand and support our concepts but he was severely restricted by the Geschäftsführer so that our project was de facto boycotted the after 1998 exhibition from becoming too successful. After 1998 there was nobody in charge of selling CATpool, which is the safest way to kill a product and just that was probably intended (or course, we can't prove that but there was nobody selling it, so what?!). Another important detail that was never implemented were marketing and sales activities between the exhibitions, which take place every two years.

Just for the records: It was solely Messe Frankfurt who where in charge of marketing and sales (said the contract). When we signed this contract we were too trustfull to expect that they did so sales at all for our project after 1998.

New management killed CATpool for no reason

Soon after the Automechanika director changed and Horst Niedlich was promoted to director of all technical fairs except Automechanika. Then a new Geschäftsführer became responsible for all IT projects and he cancelled all and everything that his predecessor had started.

The new Automechanika director Michel-Alexandre Morlat and the new Geschäftsführer Günter Gladitsch were completely unwilling to even get to know the concepts, to listen and to learn and to discuss them.

Instead they just broke our contract in 2003 betraying us by leaving substantial payments open without any reason or argument in an extremely incorrect business attitude. This is how a state-owned large company in Germany betrays a small, innovative and absolutely correct and — far too — successful business partner!

We are now finally free to launch our own project

The contract with Messe Frankfurt imposed restrictions on us but fortunately this contract ended in 2006 so that we are now finally free to launch our own CATpool system without being limited by exhibition people who do not understand the Internet and know little about existing business relations and who are unwilling to listen and learn from software experts with 30 years of software experience not only in the automotive industry.

Open for new co-operations with exhibition organizers

Our concepts, products and experiences are a very good basis for new and very successful co-operations with exhibition organizers and this is also why we wrote these open words about what happened with Messe Frankfurt.

Therefore, if you are an exhibition organizer we invite you to profit from this unique opportunity and from our products and concepts.