  The Surface Brightness Fluctuation method has been shown to be a powerful
distance indicator for dwarf elliptical galaxies to very low surface brightness
levels. It is applicable to stellar systems that are out of reach for classical
indicators requiring resolved stellar populations such as the tip magnitude of
the red giant branch. I briefly discuss a few results from recent SBF studies
of dEs to demonstrate the significance of the SBF method to address
long-standing issues related to cosmography, dark matter in galaxy groups,
substructures in clusters, and the discrepancy between the mass function of
collapsed objects and the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function. For the
analysis of the large number of galaxy images that need to be processed as part
of such SBF studies we are currently developing a fast, semi-automatic
reduction pipeline that will be made readily available to the astronomical
community.
