09.09.2024
“Resilience is like a muscle“
Rising protectionism, external shocks like the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as high energy prices with accompanying high inflation: the past few years have been characterized by a high degree of insecurity. How can businesses deal with these challenges? Balluff relies on the basic principle of resilience.
What does the term “resilience“ have to do with Balluff?
Frank Nonnenmann: Many have heard the term in the context of personal stress management, but it can also be applied to organizations. How can we as a company adjust to shocks, challenges, and crises to subsequently recover from them and emerge stronger? Over the course of the past five years, we have experienced a multitude of “once-in-a-lifetime events”, from the COVID-19 pandemic to collapsing international supply chains and the uptick in international crises and wars. As a company, we have to deal with the consequences every day.
How do you as management safely maneuver through this world?
Frank Nonnenmann: One thing is certain: there is no such thing as complete security. As an entrepreneur, you always take a certain amount of risk with every decision. But you are right that developments are currently happening at a rapid pace. This makes long-term, stability-based planning difficult.
What do you mean?
Frank Nonnenmann: The 1990s and 2000s were characterized by a continuous expansion of global supply chains and an increasing degree of international interconnectedness between different economic areas. Crises remained local, trade barriers fell, and companies expanded. Balluff also established many of its sales offices during this time, with the ones in the Czech Republic, Italy, Singapore, and China in the nineties, followed by the production plant in Chengdu in 2007. Becoming faster and reducing prices were our main goals during the expansion of our supply chain. Resilience was less of a focus.
Frank Nonnenmann, Managing Director Balluff
Does this mean that resilience is more important for companies today?
Frank Nonnenmann: Resilience has always been important. It is by no means a given that a company lasts more than a hundred years. Balluff has already experienced turbulent times with many upheavals in the past. Being able to set a clear course based on strong values, even in uncertain times, is important. For us, our customer focus has always served us well as a compass. It is part of the Balluff DNA, meaning we want to be close to our customers and the markets.
In order to be able to guarantee short delivery times and a high degree of delivery power, we have made changes to our production and logistics network so it can handle changes, uncertainties, and disturbances even more resiliently. One important milestone was the establishment of our new production plant in Aguascalientes, Mexico.
Including Aguascalientes, you now operate three large production sites in Mexico, Hungary, and China.
Frank Nonnenmann: That is correct; a powerful trio. We believe in a local and regional economy. The three sites for large-scale production cover our three main regions. The diversification of production and our global presence not only ensure our internal flexibility, but also offer our customers an increased security of supply. Regardless of developments in global politics, customers can rely on Balluff to be a dependable supplier.
We believe in a local and regional economy. The three sites for large-scale production cover our three main regions.
Frank Nonnenmann, Managing Director Balluff
One of your company values is agility. Does your organization benefit from this?
Florian Hermle: The most sophisticated system is only as good as the people who work in it. We are lucky to have such a motivated and flexible global team. Without the unconditional determination of our employees, whether in the warehouse, in production, or development, to find a solution for our customers, even when the going gets tough, our company would not be here today. In addition to the individual commitment of each employee, we also have a culture of cooperation at both the local and global level.
We have talked a lot about production so far. What about other areas?
Frank Nonnenmann: We also follow our diversification strategy in logistics. Last year, we opened a state-of-the-art logistics center at our location in Hungary. There, fully and semi-automated warehouse technology ensures optimal production supply and distribution to regional Balluff distribution centers.
Florian Hermle: We have also done our homework in the sales department and are committed to our approach with three core regions. Thanks to our web shop and virtual sales team, we are able to quickly and easily respond to customer inquiries, while also always staying close to our customers with our local sales offices. Particularly in cases that require individual automation solutions, our customers benefit from our high level of technical consulting expertise.
Florian Hermle, Managing Director Balluff
What about the Balluff solutions? How do they help make production processes more resilient?
Florian Hermle: We see great potential in providing meaningful data from the production process across divisions. In particular, the opportunities arising from the use of modern IO-Link products support customers in becoming more resilient and sustainable, gaining a real competitive advantage. We also see great potential for innovation in the field of industrial image processing for robotics. For the use of robots, we have products that deliver high-precision images to enable optimal robot performance. In the future, we plan to expand our existing portfolio with additional products that specifically support robotic applications such as pick & place and bin picking. Digital commissioning is an increasingly important topic for many of our customers in mechanical and plant engineering. This means that they want to create a fully digitized model of their plant and of course need digital components from Balluff for this. All in all, this means better data, greater benefits, and easier handling.
Resilience is like a muscle: if you don’t use it regularly, it will atrophy.
Florian Hermle, Managing Director Balluff
Training resilience is also important. Are we more resilient as a company today than we were five years ago?
Florian Hermle: Resilience is like a muscle: if you don’t use it regularly, it will atrophy. The past five years have given us ample opportunity to train resilience and agility. That's why we are very confident that we will continue to face change successfully in the future.
