An Exclusive Interface with (Mr.Rohit Vaidya) Managing Director of “ifm electronic India Private Limited”
A&I UPDATE: Take us through the journey of “ifm-India” In India & Company’s Current Operations.
ifm India is the second oldest subsidiary of ifm electronic GmbH. The operations in India started in year 1994 and formal subsidiary was formed in year 2009. ifm India operates on pan India level and is one of the most efficient organizations in its industry segment. We have a legacy of offering value proposition to our customers and to help solve their problems.
Today, ifm India has offices in 7 different locations in India to cater our customers in every corner of the country. We plan to move ifm’s HQ from Kolhapur to Pune in coming months to better serve our customers. The new logistic centre in Pune will also help us ensure same day delivery to customers in the region and even faster delivery to rest of the customers in India.
This strategic move of relocation shall not only help us enhance customer experience but also help us attract new talent to make our operations better and more efficient.
A&I UPDATE: Please brief us about “ifm” Global Network & Infrastructure.
ifm is a global company, having global presence and enough localization which makes us successful and trustworthy. The continuous innovation, improvement in our products makes us a reliable choice among thousands of customers over last 56 years.
ifm has subsidiaries over 50 different countries and trade partners in more than 50 countries. Every year ifm steps into a new country to make our global presence stronger and to serve our customers in that region.
ifm has a true global manufacturing setup. Major manufacturing setup is in Germany followed by Poland, USA, Singapore and Romania factories. ifm plans to open new factory in Asia and central America in coming years.
A&I UPDATE: What are the Market Opportunities for Your Process Sensors, Motion Control Sensors & automation solutions Products in India.
Today machine world is coming closer and closer due to technology advancement such as IIoT. We believe for any kind of advancement, reliability plays an important role if it is to be sustainable. ifm works exactly on this notion and committed to produce reliable sensors which serves as eyes and ears to make this technology reliable and sustainable. Due to this belief, the biggest opportunity for our sensors lies in providing reliable solutions in IIoT and predictive analysis sector. We want to take projectized approach to help our customers, we have been doing so for our mobile customers, however; now we have started doing so for rest of the industries as well. This makes ifm as one stop shop for our customers.
A&I UPDATE: What are the exclusive products which your company offers to various industries? How do you plan to position these Products?
Recently ifm came up with state of the art Hygienic Magnetic flow meter, ultrasonic flow meter. Further ifm is one of the founder members of IO link technology and offers IO link masters and total wiring solution.
Moneo is one of our flagship product enabling customers to monitor machine health via critical parameters and also enables to store them in cloud, this end to end solution will soon be available in India.
A&I UPDATE: Please brief us on “ifm” latest top line Product Range for Industrial Automation Industry.
Industrial Automation industry is a key industry for ifm. Being worked in Industrial Automation industry for significant amount to time in my career, this industry is very special for me. We do not rely on specific products to cater to this industry considering the very vastness of this sector. As mentioned earlier we believe in solution oriented approach and tend to derive solution based on customer requirements using variety of sensors, ranging basic sensors such as temperature, pressure to our state of the art sensors such as vibration along with Moneo software to support predictive analysis and optimization.
A&I-UPDATE: What marketing strategy does “ifm” use to maintain its leadership position in Process Sensors, Motion Control Sensors & Industrial Automation & IoT Solutions?
Marketing strategies are very important to reach out to our customers especially in the era of digitization. We believe in blending traditional marketing with digital marketing as different areas and industries demand different ways. We also believe in “walk to talk” philosophy, meaning whatever we promote in different marketing strategies for different products, we stand by it 100%, may that be product usage, specifications or ifm’s iconic 5 years warranty. By the way we are in 35th year of 5 year warranty.
We trust that only marketing does not help us maintaining leadership position, it also requires devoted and qualified people to fulfil customer’s expectations and to solve their problems.
A&I UPDATE: Which Key Industries do you cater to? Please Share Some of Application Area?
We cater to key industries such as steel, automotive, machine tools, food and agriculture, port and ship building, mobile machines, water, robotics and assembly automation etc. Along with these industries, we also serve renewable energy sector, chemical industry, EV manufacturing, logistic industry, mining, semiconductor and so on.
It is difficult to encapsulate application area because ifm serves its customer where customers are in trouble. The application can be anything ranging from a simple application of temperature monitoring to as complex as predictive maintenance of a critical device or group of critical devices.
A&I-UPDATE: What are your goals for 2025 and plan for expanding into the Indian market?
Goal of ifm are pretty simple and straight forward,
We want to serve our customers better, faster by being close to them. That is why ifm’s moto is “close to you”. This also one of the reasons that we are moving our office and logistic centre to Pune.
ifm always believes in long term relationship with our customers and our employees too. This is why we empower our existing employees to work in efficient way so that they achieve more success each year, grow in the organization, take more responsibilities and deliver results. In a nutshell, we have committed ourselves to deliver more sales growth with same number of employees by being more efficient.
We also plan take over new geographical territories and enter into new areas of business to make ourselves more stable and risk averse.
