Enabling Progress

Bharat Fritz Werner Ltd (BFW), a flagship company of the Kothari Group, is India’s leading solution provider of machine tools. With its focus on innovation and disruption, the company has rightly set the stage to enable and support its growth.

Bharat Fritz Werner Ltd (BFW) began its journey in 1961 as a joint venture between Fritz Werner Germany and Indian Promoters, the Kothari Group of Industries, at a time when our country was developing its industrial identity following independence. Around 2002, the Indian promoters bought out all the stake of Fritz Werner, and BFW became a fully Indian-owned company.

“Over our journey of 60 years, we have found our purpose of ‘Enabling Progress,’ and we have sustained that purpose throughout. It has become our guiding light and is infused deep in the DNA of the company,” shares Ravi Raghavan, Managing Director, BFW.

The company started building SPMs (Special Purpose Machines) way back in 1970 and began exporting products in 1979. It was the first Indian company to supply local machining solutions to well-known Japanese multinationals like Maruti Suzuki, Toyota, and Honda as they set up their shops to shape India’s Automotive industry. Over the years, its product range expanded, and so did its leadership as a solution provider.

“Over the last decade, we have focused on getting our product platforms to the global level of technology and have also expanded our offerings to include comprehensive milling/turning and multi-process technologies, automation, IoT, process engineering, and recently, additive technology,” he says.

“As we celebrate our 60th year of service to manufacturing, we are thankful to all our customers for their strong trust in us, all our supply chain partners, and our dedicated employees,” he adds.

Catering to a wide variety of segments

BFW is well spread over many industry segments, including Automotive, Farm Equipment, Defense, Aerospace, Railways, Job Shops, Die & Mould, Oil & Gas, Energy, Infrastructure, to name a few. “Automotive remains the largest segment, but over the last five years, we have consciously reduced our over-dependence on Automotive by capturing more opportunities in other segments. Our product and market development strategies reflect this direction. For example, keeping in mind the needs of Aerospace, Defense, and Medical segments today, we have a full range of high-end 5-Axes machine platforms – Vertical, Horizontal, and Double Column configurations. We are also the first Indian machine maker to have an in-house developed array of combination 2-Axes spindle heads to suit these platforms,” shares Raghavan.

Globally, BFW is operational in Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Turkey), Russia, South East Asian countries, and the Middle East along with its distributor partners and promotes select high-end technologies in these segments.

Focus on R&D

BFW launched Dr Kalam Center for Innovation in 2016 to create applied R&D for next-gen manufacturing technologies. Raghavan elaborates, “Our purpose is to ‘Enable Progress’, and being an industry leader in the Indian industry, we believe it is our responsibility to continue to develop new technologies through the applied R&D route. At Dr Kalam Centre of Innovation, our teams are doing significant work in the field of common technologies, which we subsequently deploy on various product platforms.”

The company has developed a unique composite structure technology (I C Tec – Patent Pending) to enhance the rigidity and vibration-damping performance of machine structures, resulting in the superior surface finish of parts produced on machines and enhanced tool life.

“In India, we have a typical problem of significant temperature variations within a day and across the year. Hence, our customers need to produce parts with increasingly stringent accuracy needs. To overcome this issue, we have developed a radically intelligent Thermal Compensation Technology (I RTC – Patent Pending). This allows compensating thermal deflections in real time while machining the components and ensures the highest standards of consistent accuracies on our products,” he explains.

IRIS, the company’s scalable, modular IoT platform based on Edge processing technology, is helping create smart shop floors for its customers. This technology has also been developed at Dr Kalam Centre of Innovation.

“Besides these, our teams are engaged in ultra-high-speed spindle technologies, a combination of spindle heads and a variety of sensor-based systems. Dr Kalam Centre of Innovation is providing a strong technology foundation for our future products,” he remarks.

Questioning the status quo

BFW has been recognized as one of the Top 25 Most Innovative Companies in India at the prestigious CII Industrial Innovation Awards from more than 600 companies across the nation. Raghavan comments on this acknowledgment from the industry, “We are happy to have been included by CII in the list. At BFW, we have been encouraging innovation and creativity continually. Our effort is to develop a strong culture of innovation. Innovation does not stop with a product; it includes questioning the status quo of everything that comes in the way of serving customers effectively. Therefore, it includes processes, products, technologies, and services.”

BFW has evolved a strong platform-based concept of products deployed across the product families. “As we conceive a new platform, we brainstorm and set very high goals for the platform, which necessarily demand unconventional solutions. For example, our Mach platform constitutes the slimmest high-speed machines. This meant questioning every conventional norm to minimize the footprint,” he informs.

In daily routine work, the company has a robust kaizen process to kindle the creativity of its people in evolving minor improvements in day-to-day operations.

“Recently, we deployed the SAP Hanna platform, and we are in the process of revamping and digitizing all our internal processes to serve the customer more efficiently. In a nutshell, questioning the status quo is a way of life at BFW,” he points out.

BFW has delved into Additive Manufacturing (AM) and Digital Manufacturing and has signed a strategic partnership with Meltio, a disruptive laser metal deposition technology manufacturer, for the AM technology.

In sync with current times

Briefing us with this alliance and the company’s goals to tap business opportunities in AM and Digital Manufacturing, Raghavan says, “The world of manufacturing is undergoing major technology disruptions, and the growth of additive technology is one of them. Globally, additive technology is slated to grow from US$18 billion industry to US$148 billion industry at a CAGR of 25 percent over the next decade. Indian manufacturing will not be an exception to this. The current share of the Indian industry in the world of metal additive is 2 percent. The ‘Atmanibhar Bharat’ initiative of the Indian Government will create big growth opportunities for the deployment of additive technology in Aerospace, Defense, Energy, and MRO segments, apart from its penetration in traditional Automotive, Die & Mould, and prototyping applications. Therefore, we see significant growth opportunities in the AM and Hybrid areas.”

BFW would like to enable the large-scale transition of AM technology from ‘niche’ to ‘industrial applications’, he shares, adding, “We see DED (Direct Energy Deposition) as a great technology for the future for this transition. Our alliance with Meltio, Spain, will help us evolve several CNC and Robotic product platforms to meet the diverse needs of the Indian industry.”

Scaling up

m2nxt Solutions and BAMPL (BFW Advanced Manufacturing Solutions Pvt Ltd) are wholly-owned subsidiaries of BFW. When asked how they contribute to the parent company, Raghavan replies, “The manufacturing world is undergoing a disruptive transformation – from discreet, isolated manufacturing to fully connected, autonomous factories. We have decided to be a significant player, enabling our customers to transition seamlessly into the new ecosystem. With this objective, our subsidiary m2nxt is focusing on Physical and IoT-based virtual automation solutions, Process engineering, and now Additive manufacturing solutions.”

While BFW will continue to focus on making various machine solutions, m2nxt will focus on everything around the machine—material movement, automation, quality assurance, assembly processes, etc.—to evolve a connected system in a cohesive manner for its customers.

Over the last three years, m2nxt has already evolved exciting solutions for machine automation, die casting automation, IRIS solutions, and many others.

BAMPL addresses a different need. The Indian Government’s ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ has ambitious plans in the Aerospace and Defense segments. “The customers will need a reliable capability for sourcing high-precision, complex parts of exotic materials. BAMPL will specialize in the manufacturing and supply of such complex mid-size components and subsystems within India and globally. To us, it is a natural extension of the manufacturing expertise that has been gained over decades by BFW,” he adds.

Within its first year of operation, BAMPL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BFW, is already certified with ‘AS9000 D’, which is essential for the supply of high-quality components to the Aerospace domain.

A platform to celebrate manufacturing

Traditionally, manufacturing is considered the ‘Backend’ industry. However, considering its role as the backbone of every product the people at BFW touch and feel in their daily lives, they have come up with a platform – Manufacturing Day – to ‘celebrate manufacturing’. As Raghavan explains, “The objective of the Manufacturing Day is to get senior manufacturing professionals on a common platform to network, share best practices, discuss common challenges, and evolve roadmaps to address them.”

Over the last six editions at Pune, Gurgaon, Chennai, Bangalore, and two virtual events in 2020 and 2021, the event has been very well received by the manufacturing fraternity. Several thought leaders have contributed invaluable insights to these events, including global thought leaders Jason Jennings, Steve Faber, and Sonam Wangchuk, to name a few. The event has addressed several issues like Innovation Culture, Road Map for Smart Manufacturing, Upcoming Technologies in Manufacturing, etc.

Source: BFW Ltd

Poonam Pednekar
Chief Copy Editor
Magic Wand Media Inc
poonam.pednekar@magicwandmedia.in