Thriving Beyond Borders

The EMAG Group’s enormous growth can be attributed to its strategy of continuous expansion. With its Indian subsidiary, the Group has ensured that the demands of its customers for its state-of-the-art manufacturing solutions are well taken care of.

The EMAG Group, with its headquarters in Salach, Germany, has earned a prominent position globally, owing to its experience and expertise in offering the best manufacturing solutions for precision metal components.

The group has stretched far and wide, offering just the right machines for a slew of metal cutting applications including soft and hard turning, grinding, drilling, hobbing, milling, welding, electrochemical machining, induction hardening, joining etc. “This allows us to plan and execute huge and complete turnkey projects,” states Andreas Zieger, Director, Operations, EMAG India Pvt Ltd.

Although EMAG has been present in the Indian market since the late 1980s, it was in the year 1996 that the country branch office – EMAG India – came into effect. Today, with its headquarters in Bangalore, it has become a fully functional market company and a technology center. It is supported by branches in Noida, Gujarat, Pune and Chennai with the view to offer best services and sales in the country. With the growing demands of the customers worldwide, EMAG has now 39 branches all over the world in six continents.

Prime sectors in Indian market

Automotive, machine tool manufacturing and oilfield as well as manufacturing of components make for EMAG India’s core markets. EMAG is a trendsetter in the field of vertical turning centers, multi-spindle machining centers and multi-functional production machines, and has become an important partner in the realization of complete process streams in the manufacture of automotive transmission, engine and chassis components.

“Due to the demand of mass production of high-precision parts, the automotive industry is a challenge as well as an opportunity. 80 percent of our business comes out of that sector,” informs Zieger.

India is an important market for EMAG since the country has its own top car OEMs and nearly all international OEMs are now targeting the market. The company works with OEMs and further down in the supply chain with international tier 1 component suppliers and their sub suppliers. “We develop complete lines for OEMs who want to gain on their technology leadership, and we also work with big component suppliers to develop stable processes with their sub suppliers. Our customers know our abilities and often come with their raw parts to us and we deliver solutions for their mass production,” he says. In the aviation industry, the company has been successful at a technology used in the mass production of the turbo charger for modern small-sized combustion engines.

Large range of solutions for batch and mass production

“With the aid of local teams, we offer special machine solutions like for instance for CV joint milling or exotic joining machines for high-precision mass production of cam shafts or gear shafts. Along with our international teams and based on our global experience of the challenging OEM world, we can support our customers in India with complete lines from raw parts to marked and 100 percent finished parts in the mass production of brake discs, diff cases, welded fly wheels, pistons and turbo charger parts,” Zieger divulges.

“Our standard vertical pickup turning machines are ideal for soft and hard turning mass production, and are at the entry level of the high-quality, automated machine world. These machines are known for high accuracy, long machine life and trouble-free production. Here the focus was to integrate the automation and make it flexible to link the machines to various lines and rearrange them later on,” he adds.

Thanks to its multitude of machining and automation technologies and extensive knowledge in process design, the EMAG Group can handle demands of the manufacturers of medium-sized component batches too who also want “solutions from a single source”.

Ways to ramp up

Zieger believes that there is a lot of hype around Industry 4.0 at this point. “In mass production, 85 percent availability of machines is required and hence, we must target the underutilized invested capacity if we consider ramping up. Measuring, analysing, connecting and optimizing by yolking the mechanical world of machine tools with IT and Big Data will give the next push in the direction of cost saving,” he notes.

EMAG is focused on providing machine information and additional sensors with equipment. On one side, it is reaping benefits with its turnkey solutions and on the other, it is working actively with industry advisory boards to develop some standards to link more elements to benefit its customers. “We are considering the data safety aspect too, which is currently a very strong topic in Germany,” says Zieger.

“At the moment, we are keenly working on our user interface to simplify machine operations. We are gathering machine data to create additional information and value for customer. This will help in optimizing operations by providing faster information about the machine status to support our service,” he informs. This is being done through an application. Options are also available to find and display additional product and process information which, he claims, will save time.

EMAG customer training courses

Zieger is happy with the quality of the training offered in India. “Our EMAG training is primarily for the application we offer with our machines for the setting of specific parameters,” he explains. There is a special training program available on EMAG parameters, which varies from machine to machine. “A detailed maintenance training is also proffered to maintain the machine tool in the right way so that customers can make the most of our machines for decades. And most important is the operator training, because at the end we sell tools and only trained operators can make good products out of good tools,” sums up Zieger doling out a manufacturing maxim.

Author:

Poonam Pednekar

Chief Copy Editor

Magic Wand Media Inc

poonam.pednekar@magicwandmedia.in

India is an important market for EMAG since the country has its own top car OEMs and nearly all international OEMs are now targeting the market.

“Unlike many machine tool sellers who sell out of catalogue, it is essential for us to analyze the whole production process of our Indian customers and find them optimum solutions.”

Andreas Zieger
Director, Operations
EMAG India Pvt Ltd