Industry Insights: EMO Hannover 2013

Thought leaders tackled a spectrum of topics across the cutting tool and machine industries during two roundtable discussions at this year’s EMO Hannover. Hosted by GIE Media, and sponsored by StarragHeckert and Kennametal, the roundtables addressed issues ranging from the workforce skills gap to the role of automation in the manufacturing business.
 

Skills Gap

“There are not enough people going into the business that are engineers – not just in [cutting tools], but in production as well. There’s a shortage of manufacturing engineers so customers look to companies like ours to assist them in implementing, and that’s where the bottleneck is.” – Jamie Price, Sandvik Coromant

“Being a good process engineer or manufacturing engineer is a very, very creative job. But people still think of factories as being factories, and not being some place they can use their creativity.” – Rick Simon, Hardinge
 

Customer Relationships

“We keep hearing about social media’s going to change the world, and it’s going to move forward. I think it will, but it’s not yet taken over in our industry because we have a technical sale, and a person wants to be able to ask a question.” – Mike Ramsey, Kennametal

“The relationship between machine tool customers and machine tool producers [is] like the same relationship between a private banker and his wealthy client. It’s based on trust. That’s also why you need trustful salespeople…It’s not Internet sales.” – Dr. Frank Brinken, StarragHeckert
 

Complete Solutions

“We don’t sell tools anymore. We sell processes – finished processes. More and more, we have to look at the whole package to provide the customer with a good performance.” – Dr. Uwe Schleinkofer, Ceratizit

“[Customers] are asking more for engineering support, and that means even after the machine is installed…we get calls. We get customers sending us a part drawing asking us, ‘How can we make this?’…It’s not just supplying a machine anymore.” – Ben Baggerly, WFL Millturn Technologies
 

Future Innovation

“In the next 5 years, most developments are going to come from the coating technology, and that also includes surface treatment [and] stress treatment. The key is going to be the speed of innovation.” – Muff Tanriverdi, Walter Tools

“The marvelous thing about this industry is that the more we think things combine, there’s new innovation that comes into play. The constant is really changing and we’re going to see continuous change, and it’s going to affect the design of machine tools.” – Brian Papke, Mazak

Watch the complete sessions here:
Cutting Tool Roundtable: http://bit.ly/Hw2b9S.
Machine Tool Roundtable: http://bit.ly/HyE3Cw.