May this year saw the inauguration, by means of an event that replicates in Romania traditional global events organized in other countries by mother companies, the largest showroom of a machine tool supplier for the Romanian market. DMG MORI made the most significant investment of this kind in Romania and now owns the largest exhibition and demonstration space for the machines of this German-Japanese group, raising the stakes to a very high level for the related domestic market. The determination behind DMG MORI to invest in a new, European level headquarter for its Romanian dealership, as well as other information on the group’s projects, are shared Octavian Andriţoiu, Managing Director of DMG MORI Romania.
Interview with Octavian Andriţoiu, Managing Director DMG MORI Romania
T&T: As managing director of DMG MORI, you have recorded significant turnovers and constant growth in the past years on the Romanian market. Have these accomplishments influenced the corporation into opening an European-level Technology Center in Romania?
Octavian Andrițoiu: Our decision was the natural consequence of the constant positive sales on the Romanian market. To maintain this trend, we wish to prove our customers that a large part of our resources on this market are being reinvested to improve our level of services supplied to Romanian companies. In parallel, we would like to bring a new concept to Romania – that of a Tech Center.
T&T:What are the benefits of opening a Technology Center in Piteşti? How will it increase the quality of the DMG MORI services for its beneficiaries on the Romanian market?
O.A.: We imported the Tech Center concept from other large markets of ours (Germany, Japan, USA, Scandinavia). This concept brings flexibility to our activities by consolidation of several essential services into a single location, with direct benefits for our customers.
Besides technical discussions, the customers are most interested by the practical side. For this, we are now making available a wide range of machinery for free cutting tests. These tests will not be mere demonstrations of our machines’ quality, but will accurately reproduce the production process (together with the customer) in order to identify the most effective manufacturing methods.
Another significant feature of the new Tech Center is training. The training facilities that we provided are on the same par with those of the DMG MORI Training Academy of Germany. The Romanian market sorely misses trained personnel in the processing industry. Whether it’s digital machine tools operators or programmers, the available human resources became very thin over the past years. This creates serious problems for companies which are seeing their basic activities jeopardized and which may lead to absurd situations on the market.
T&T:What did you display at the Grand Opening DMG MORI SEIKI Romania and what are your permanent exhibits of DMG MORI in your Piteşti showroom?
O.A:We presented 8 equipments at the opening of the new Tech Center, some of them being premieres. The number of machines presented in our Tech Center will permanently vary for objective reasons: some machines are purchased by Romanian customers (as it happened during this opening event), other machines are returned to factories in order to be replaced with other models, thus allowing our visitors to see a larger number of our products (the size and facilities of the new location now enabling us to be more flexible in that regard).
Machines dissplayed in the showroom
- DMC 1450 vertical turning centre (X/Y/Z = 1450/700/700 mm) – a premiere in Romania, this machine having been first launched at Open House Pfronten 2015 just several months earlier
- The Ultrasonic 30 5-axis centre – an advanced technology machine for the processing of special, very hard and/or brittle materials (such as optical glass – for lenses used in satellites, hard ceramic – used for dental applications and in the electronic industry, diamond [synthetic and or natural], special steels [inconel], etc.)
- MillTap 700 5-axis centre – first machine of its kind being presented in Romania – very compact and very fast, with the best price/quality ratio in its class.
- NLX2500SY/700 horizontal lathe – a lathe which allows full processing, in one set-up, of high complexity parts thanks to a counter-universal and the Y axis.
- SPRINT 20-5 lathe (Swiss type) – first presentation in Romania, the newest machine of its type in this product range.
- ecoMill 1035V vertical centre (ECOLINE range) – a machine improved from many perspectives, with emphasis on increased performance and flexibility.
- ecoMill 70 3+2 axis centre (ECOLINE range) – the most versatile entry-level machine, allowing 5 face processing in one set-up.
- ecoTurn 510 V3 horizontal lathe (ECOLINE range) – the largest lathe in the ECOLINE range until fall last year (now, the offer includes the ecoTurn 650, which allows the processing of larger diameters and lengths).AWhat was the evolution of your company in the past years? Is Romania a developing market with good prospects for DMG MORI?
T&T: What was the evolution of your company in the past years? Is Romania a developing market with good prospects for DMG MORI?
O.A.: The opening of this Tech Center speaks for itself in what regards our evolution on the Romanian market. DMG MORI grew year after year thanks to a diversification of customers. From more than 1,100 Romanian companies from the processing industry, 257 are our customers. This means 25%. It is a huge step ahead by DMG MORI since deciding its direct involvement in Romania.
The potential of this market is significant. There are many companies which need our products and services. The Romanian economy itself has a lot of untapped potential, which once explored, will create even more opportunities for machine tool producers. In this regard, I think we are still in our “teenage years”, but slowly we will “grow up”.
T&T:What are the DMG MORI targets for the local market and what other projects will it carry out in Romania?
O.A.:The possibilities offered by the new location will diversify our objectives on the Romanian market. Besides reinforcing our position as a leader, we also wish to develop new directions that will bring added value to the cooperation between DMG MORI and Romanian companies. In this respect, I can tell you for the first time about two such directions. One is our massive involvement in automation systems (both locally and by the involvement of our division, DMG MORI Systems, in order to provide cost-optimized flexible alternatives for highly automated processing systems – ideally, 100%). Another direction is to begin partnerships with Romanian strategic clients. For this, we wish to move some of our foreign production activities to Romania.
For confidentiality reasons, I cannot disclose further information for now, but once these projects become reality, the readers of the “Tehnică și Tehnologie” magazine will be the first to know more about our activities.
