Fuji Europe Corporation, specialist in electronic placement machines, has celebrated its 30th anniversary. The company says it began with a small team of just 8 employees and without a fixed organizational structure. Since then, its workforce has increased 10-fold and the company has grown into a globally active supplier of electronic pick-and-place machines.
“For the first 20 years, Fuji Europe Corporation was under Japanese management and embraced the Japanese work culture, which is based on values like intensity and fairness, among others,“ said Klaus Gross, Managing Director of Fuji Europe, who has been with the company since 1992. “For the last 10 years, we have been operating under German management, but we still work closely with the team from Japan. I really appreciate the intercultural cooperation.
“My roots are in technology, which has always fascinated me – even now as Managing Director. In our industry, you‘re always working on the pulse of time. This requires constant adaptation to current market needs and technological developments. This is how we have been able to grow stably and continuously,“ he explained.
More structure and digitization
The company says it has always practised flat hierarchies. “The organizational structure has evolved over the years into clear processes,“ Gross explained. ““What were once short communication channels have become fast and effective communication, which has become even more digitally determined since the Corona pandemic.“
Gross looks back at the time without internet, email, smartphones and navigation systems: “In the daily work routine of that time, the cycle rate was considerably lower than in a working environment permeated by digitization, as we find it today,“ he said. “Certainly, digitization has great advantages and also brings efficiency gains, but in the analog age it was more communicative in part because a different form of exchange was required.
“Overall, business back then was based more on trust and was more humane in the sense that there was no need for long contracts, contractual penalties, NDA‘s and calculations that had to be coherent after the third decimal. In comparison, the returns were higher.“
Today, the company says it covers all areas of modern production – “from highly flexible placement systems in high-mix to complete placement lines in high-volume“. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, the company attended the Productronica 2021 expo in Munich to present its solutions for autonomous and flexible production. It explained that these are specifically designed to meet the requirements in terms of automation, digitalization and flexibilization of processes in favor of the smart factory.
