A Russian manufacturer of color sorters learns from Audi and Mercedes

Seven top managers of CSort, leading Russian manufacturer of color sorting equipment, trained in Germany and consequently took a number of crucial decisions.

A Russian manufacturer of color sorters learns from Audi and Mercedes

Seven top managers of CSort, leading Russian manufacturer of color sorting equipment, trained in Germany and consequently took a number of crucial decisions.

CSort is now targeted at European market and, to facilitate the process of conquering, executives decided to demonstrate their employees how business is like in Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, Trumpf and DMG Mori. These enterprises were chosen intentionally: CSort has long been cooperating with Trumpf and with state and regional financial support purchased high-precision Trumpf equipment.

Apart from Maxim Savinkov, CSort General Manager, the delegation included heads of logistics, production, R&D, QA, and storage departments.

“At the moment our company aims at import substitution and conquering of European market, both targets closely related to each other. All of us have attentively followed the Annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly. Vladimir Putin emphasized, an import-substituting company should sell a certain amount of its products in the export market that would speak for its competitive high-quality goods. CSort has been selling its color sorting machines to CIS-countries for over 5 years; in 2015 we entered a new market and started promoting our equipment in Europe. Learning from and training at the world-leading companies helps to change our employees’ perception about production and business processes which would result in a more qualitative equipment for Russian and foreign companies”, Maxim Savinkov about the goals of the trip.

Here are the changes to take place in CSort after training and internship in Germany.

Process robotization

German companies are distinguished by a high degree of robotics. CSort is carefully thinking about it in regard to certain processes, welding in the first place. During their visit to Germany top managers found necessary equipment and now studying its capacities.

Industry 4.0

Now Germany is actively implementing technology of the future - Industry 4.0, which is a cyber-physical system integrating principles of interoperability, virtualization, real-time capability and some others. Eugene Galkin, head of R&D department: “We’ve seen how it works in Germany and decided to introduce some elements of this technology in our equipment. In the coming years our machines will be integrated in a single information network to take advantage of real-time management for production processes, perform timely service and on-line monitoring, troubleshoot and update software”.

New relations with suppliers – Just in time

German concerns practically have no stock. For example, Audi assembles and rolls off a car within a day, while 70% of its components are brought all over from European Union. Each detail gets to the factory 6 hours before the assembly. As Savinkov, “Europe lacks disruption of supplies, so we also decided to implement Just in time system when all details are delivered to production on time. This system strongly depends on reliability of suppliers and we will review them all, at the same time integrating European experience: one SKU – two suppliers. If one fails, the other will not”.

Training center for clients

Visit to Germany resulted in a new training center, which will upgrade qualifications of CSort servicemen and train clients how to operate CSort equipment. New sorting methods, latest news from color sorting world, cutting-edge software will be available at the center.

Clean and tidy

“Have you ever been to a pharmacy? As compared to Germany production a pharmacy is a mess, tells Maxim Savinkov, We realized that order doesn’t cost extra and we are ready to have the same Ordnung as in Germany”.

Sergey Stepanov, head of the production department, proceeds: “To reach the level of German companies we have to give quality at every stage strictly following instructions and orders. Now we are to develop all these documents and teach out employees to follow them using our own example”.

Pilot production

CSort plans to establish pilot production based at JobShop department for engineers and operators to master new technologies and methods of metal processing.

This visit is just the first step of training abroad: already in April CSort production engineers fly to production facility of Trumpf.

In the near future, CSort opens its offices in Germany and Bulgaria. The Altai Regional Coordination Center of Export-oriented Business Entities Support assists CSort to promote color sorters in European market.