Interview with Percy Dengler, Managing Director of Baumer hhs GmbH
In April 2017, Percy Dengler joined Baumer hhs as the new Managing Director to lead the company into a successful future. In the medium term, he wants to give Baumer hhs a different face with a broad-based transformation program and drastically increase sales. We asked Dengler how he sees Baumer hhs as the company of the future and what measures he intends to take to achieve his goals.
Let's start with an inventory: Where does Baumer hhs stand today in the global market?
Percy Dengler: Baumer hhs has made a brilliant development since it was founded in 1986. The former garage company has grown from a pioneer in contactless adhesive application with electropneumatic valves to a leading global supplier of innovative solutions for all aspects of industrial adhesive application, including quality assurance. Decisive for this success were the joint commitment of our employees and their enthusiasm for innovative products and services. Both have been transferred to our customers and OEM partners. The special technical competence of our sales force also played an important role here. Today, the Baumer hhs brand is internationally recognized as the benchmark for reliability and quality in industrial adhesive applications.
And where do you want to take the company?
Percy Dengler: We want to further expand the quality, distinctiveness and awareness of the Baumer hhs brand in our core markets of folding cartons, corrugated board, end-of-line, print finishing and tobacco. This is a permanent task and the prerequisite for successful, globally oriented further development. In short: what we do today, we must do even better tomorrow. Our company will change significantly in the coming years for the benefit of our customers.
So what about genuine change management?
Percy Dengler: Yes, we are questioning and adapting our processes at all levels. This applies both to our process management and system support and to our corporate culture. Growth also means change. Right down to the definition of a new, future-oriented mission statement. In today's rapidly changing world, employees and customers want to know more than ever what their employers and their machine and system suppliers stand for. That is why we have intensively analyzed the questions of what the Baumer hhs brand name stands for today, how our customers see us, how non-customers see us and how we want to work in the future. The result is a broad-based transformation program based on state-of-the-art change management procedures, involving all areas of our company and pursuing a consistent process orientation. In interdisciplinary teams, we have worked extremely hard to define target processes and our goals for the future.
What are these?
Percy Dengler: There are various subgoals that continuously improve our company at all levels. For example, we will make our processes more transparent and efficient throughout, expand our global network, further increase the satisfaction of our employees, and open up new areas of business in the long term. In this way, we want to significantly increase our growth rate once again and profit disproportionately from the market.
Proud goals. Which markets offer Baumer hhs such potential?
Percy Dengler: In our traditional markets, especially the corrugated board industry and industrial packaging, i.e. end-of-line processes. We continue to see enormous growth opportunities for our technology and services in the corrugated board market, especially on the American continent and in Asia. Thanks to the efficiency and reliability of our solutions, we are currently achieving very good success here. In Europe, the online market is currently providing an intensive growth and investment boost, in which we are participating more strongly than expected thanks to our expertise.
Since 2015/2016, we have been setting standards in efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness in the end-of-line-packaging market with our tesla electric hotmelt valves and our aerto pneumatic hotmelt valves. These products have been very well received by the market. The number of end-packers who specify our hotmelt application technology in their specifications for new packaging lines is continuously increasing. We are also working more intensively than ever with the manufacturers of these machines.
Our new GlueCalc app for smartphones has recently been made available for download in the App Store and Google Play. Using it, packaging manufacturers and end packers can conveniently calculate the extent to which they are reducing their adhesive consumption and CO2 emissions by entering less data on a job-by-job basis when converting their adhesive application from caterpillars to dots. In this way, many of our customers have significantly reduced their adhesive application. And to the same extent their CO2 emissions.
Isn't this at the expense of the durability of the bondings?
Percy Dengler: With our high-precision tesla electric hotmelt valves and our pneumatic aerto hotmelt valves, it is possible to change the glue application from beads to dots on many packages without compromising the durability of the bonds. Our customers confirm adhesive savings of orders of magnitude of 50% and more achieved with our hot melt valves. In price-sensitive markets such as end-of-line packaging, this is a highly welcome added value of our products. Added to this is the longevity of our hot melt valves. For example, our tesla solenoid-operated valves operate without dynamic seals, which are usually subject to high wear. This is one of the reasons for the special reliability of these hotmelt valves.
We are continuously expanding our portfolio for the hotmelt market. For example, our Xfeed central adhesive supply system presented at FachPack 2018 is meeting with great interest from packaging manufacturers, end packagers, and adhesive manufacturers alike. Xfeed automatically supplies up to 20 hotmelt devices with adhesive granulate from central storage locations, while maintaining a high level of energy efficiency. The advantages are obvious: machine operators no longer have to handle, transport and store granulate bags on their machines. Hotmelt gluers always remain closed during production. This prevents accidents at work such as burns. In addition, the central adhesive supply guarantees clean working environments. No granulate is spilled during production and there is no risk of contamination on the way from the warehouse to the hotmelt systems. Xfeed enables conveying distances of up to 200 meters. This is unique in the market and allows a wide range of applications. With solutions such as Xfeed, we are increasingly penetrating the project business by optimizing entire processes of our customers.
What about the folding carton market, which has always been a Baumer hhs domain?
Percy Dengler: He continues to be an important sales driver for our company. We estimate our market share in the global folding carton industry at a good 80%, although we can still increase it, especially on the American continent and in Asia. The folding carton market is also growing, albeit much more moderately than the corrugated board and end-of-line markets. In this market, we repeatedly succeed in winning new customers from our competitors. For example, more and more of the large packaging groups are completely converting their adhesive application to our solutions. They achieve the best results with our products, flexibly cover practically all their requirements and have only one contact partner worldwide for all their issues relating to adhesive application and the associated quality assurance. In the folding carton market in particular, we are also an extremely important partner for OEMs. We work very closely with them in order to be able to cover the latest requirements of the industry in a forward-looking and solution-oriented manner.
Where is the journey going?
Percy Dengler: From a technical point of view, the focus is on reducing set-up times and user-friendliness, as well as using process and machine data to optimize production processes. Perhaps the production speeds of the folding carton gluers will also be able to be further increased. As early as 1998, our adhesive application and quality control systems were designed for production speeds of up to 650 m/min. At that time, this was an amazing productivity. Today we are at 700 m/min. Of course, zero-defect production has also become more and more important, which we successfully accompany in the process thanks to continuous quality monitoring.
As in all segments of the packaging market, we see three megatrends in the folding carton industry: sustainability, e-commerce and industry 4.0. The packaging industry is working at full speed to improve the environmental performance of its products. The key words here are minimized waste and the use of resources, including energy efficiency. Online trading is a strong growth driver, especially in the corrugated board industry. It will increasingly demand higher quality and individualised packaging. With Flexicoat PSA, we offer a flexible solution for the application of pressure-sensitive adhesives that are covered with silicone strips and enable online retailers to seal their corrugated packaging quickly and easily. In our opinion, we are the global market leader here as well.
And how does Baumer hhs see industry 4.0?
Percy Dengler: Industry 4.0 ultimately boils down to consistent automation or industrialization of packaging production with networked systems that communicate with one another. Our customers in the folding carton industry, in particular, will still be strongly challenged by brand manufacturers. Quality assurance in particular will continue to gain in importance for packaging manufacturers. They will increasingly access production data from their machines and processes - not only to further optimize their production processes, but above all to document the quality they produce to their customers. All three megatrends are, of course, on the radar in our research and development activities.
Can you be more specific here?
Percy Dengler: For example, the latest generation of our control units is fully industry 4.0-compatible. Xtend3 provides evaluations, analyses and statistical data from the bonding process. These can be used, among other things, for assessing the overall efficiency of the system or for error analyses. The control units are therefore extremely communicative, which means that - in addition to their extremely simple operation via intuitive multi-touch technology - they meet a basic requirement of Industry 4.0. A further example is our innovative double piston pump DPP-8, which shows the machine operators their operating states via its integrated display and automatically records, evaluates and reports all important performance data to the controllers.
Over the decades, Baumer hhs has repeatedly done pioneering work and will continue to do so. Our customers trust that they will get good products from us, that are backed by good service and that make it easier for them to make money with their production equipment. In the end, they don't buy equipment from us, they buy glued products. We provide them with solutions tailored to their needs, which enable them to do this in the best possible way. To keep it that way, we must continuously improve ourselves. Hence our broad-based transformation program. We have set out on this path and are making steady progress. We are among those companies that are constantly reinventing themselves. Our realignment makes our company more secure for the future. For our customers, this means even greater investment protection.
What role does your parent company, the Baumer Group, play in this?
Percy Dengler: It has been supporting its wholly-owned subsidiary Baumer hhs at all levels since its takeover in 2001. We will dovetail with it even more closely and, for example, further deepen and expand the joint strengths of the global sales and service networks. As a result, we can be even closer to our customers all over the world. Our claim - Let's stick together - is an excellent fit here as well. The play on words not only stands for the high quality of adhesive application with our systems, but also for intensive cooperation at all levels of our company and with our customers worldwide.
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