Global leadership through cognizance & excellence

Q. EMAG has gained substantial market share in machine tool industry worldwide , please elucidate the success story of the company?
The machine tool (MT) market is a cyclical market and to stay on top one has to face the daily challenges and reinvent oneself again and again. EMAG has been in MT business for more than 150 years. Our important milestone was the invention of vertical turning principle in the 90’s. Where lot of established manufactures had only a smile, but the vertical pick up machines are now a major concept with a lot of advantages and EMAG is market leader. Beside that core strength in turning we learned that in modern production the classical dividing lines between turning, milling and grinding will soon disappear. Our R&D started to integrate more and more technologies in our machines, even literately in one machine, we offer grinding and turning or hobbing and deburring. Now a days success factors to increase the machines performance are the automation and the flexibility of the machines to adapt the processes. Here we developed a modular machine concept in which we can integrate more and more of our technologies, like turning, grinding, hobbing, hardening and also integrate them with full automation.

Q. Please brief us about the exports and overseas operations & what are the global alliances that has been made in order to out-front the competition?
EMAG is worldwide operative, coming from Germany, Europe is still the core market and important because of the partnership with the European car OEMs, who develop parts with us together. But with our international network in sales and production, we cover all major production hubs in the world, can support our international customers with proven service solution anywhere in the world. And like all international companies we use the various local benefits for the product optimization. Here we have production plants in Germany, France, Italy as well as in US and China. Sales and Service team are in more than 20 countries and the technology centers in 6 location around our HQ in Stuttgart.

Q. What are the market prospects for the EMAG products and How do you plan to position these products?
In general I would say that the MT market is not growing significant. Additional demand is partly compensated be increase in efficiency of the machines and longer life time of the machines. EMAG is well positioned with sturdy, high tech machines and with the combination of our various technologies plus the modular machine concept the machines are ready for the future. Also in India we realize a change in the manufacturing industry from a cheap job chopper to an international oriented quality partner. And here we can provide proven solution or can develop new lines and concepts. To achieve it we need a close partnership with our customers over a well-trained sales organization as a bridge between the task of the customer and the expertise of our worldwide technology organization. Thus we develop new solutions together with our customers, like PCL for build cam shafts or HAL for jet engine blades. In all our projects we target to get the extra benefit for our customers, not simple the cheapest my too product.

Q. Can you brief us about the marketing strategies that were applied in order to stand out in the competition of machine tool industry?
Because we are seeing ourselves as technology leaders our major task is to share the knowledge, technologies and solutions with our customers to allow them to start challenging there thinking and to initiate a spark of a new concept. This is classical situation for a direct sales approach supported by informative marketing over web page, specialized magazines, Emailers. Of course we do use also the new media to share information, like success stories over Facebook or videos over YouTube. But the classical discussion between an experienced sales engineer and the responsible teams in a production plant is the most fruitful base to create an improved solution.

Q. Please elucidate in brief about the company’s infrastructure & What are the measure that are being taken from the product manufacturing to distribution?
In principle, we have worldwide three major machine production plants to produce the base machines. In our 6 technology plants we customize and tool up that machines or create complete lines, which we pretest with the customer before dispatch and finally with our worldwide service team we install and prove the machines at the customer place. The integration of various technologies to lines in combinations with additional equipment we do in our HQ. Beside turning, hobbing, grinding or laser welding we also add robot cells or central chip management systems to create complete production lines. All that requires beside a strong own production, a well-organized supply chain management and project execution management.

Q. Brief us about the R&D and Quality policy for your business?
Quality management is the backbone for our daily improvement process and allows us to get stable results and learn each day. And our centralized R&D is driven by the international driven innovation process, where we collect the needs from the market, work with institutes about future processes and material together and finally the vision of the owner family to pushing us forward. And the world is changing faster and faster, e-mobility, new materials, additive production, ….

Q. What are the key technological trends that are driving machine tool industry?
Trends from the market are the mass production to reduce costs, individualization of products with more product variances and faster life cycle time of product, fortunately the sustainability gets more importance and reduction on used resources. This requires high accurate and high efficient machines, with higher flexibility. Automation becomes a more integral part, because here the quality and efficiency can be improved. Industry 4.0 is a big word, which in my eyes will bring machine technology and IT together, here sensor technology and big data can be added. All that is to optimize the process and use underutilized capacity. Recourse saving like electricity, material, coolant in the production as well as during the machine manufacturing is gaining importance too.

Q. How do your perceive the future of the machine tool industry?
In future we will see more automated plants, where machines are linked, less manpower for stupid jobs. Technologies will come up new, like tool less electro chemical processes or additive productions. Sustainability I hope will play a more important role for the products as well as for the machines. And maybe my kids will commute in driverless cars to worldwide connected offices to plan and control the production.

Q. What is your vision for your company?
At the moment our vision is to make manufacturing systems for precision metal components, this will still stand valid for the next years and behind the curtains we look into the future and work out our part of contribution and how we need to reinvent our machines.