WAGO: Deciphering the automation market

We see a shift where automation is getting incorporated and embedded in Indian manufacturing, says Alok Kishore, Chief Executive Officer, WAGO

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WAGO has long been in the automation sector technologies, said Alok Kishore, Chief Executive Officer, WAGO India. “If we go back, we were perhaps the first ones to develop fieldbus independent I/O systems. This makes our systems more open and flexible to the demand of customers. The market understands this strength, hence, globally today we are doing the business of over a hundred million Euros in automation products alone,” he said. WAGO’s forte lies in data gathering and the representation of data. “Customers can install WAGO’s open and easy automation products, couplers, controllers that take data from any of the existing fieldbus protocols in their system and collect them in a concise form at one place making it very economical and cost-effective to gather machine data.” he added.

In terms of application, we see a shift where automation is getting incorporated and embedded in Indian manufacturing. If we look at manpower driven manufacturing versus automation driven manufacturing, the basic thing that comes through is error reduction in automation programmed manufacturing that gives reasons to expand their automation landscape. Kishore said. Elaborating, he said: “I believe that automation is picking up and I also believe that it is going to be the future because people will demand more and more structured data not just for productivity improvement but to know their own processes better than yesterday.” For example, it allows you visualize the machine trend data in usable form that represents various parameters such as temperature, vibration, power consumption and many more over a period of time. All of this predictive data cumulatively can help plan machine maintenance resulting in reduced downtime as compared to the earlier times where maintenance used to happen at machine break-down.

Expansion plan
Speaking on company’s expansion plans, Kishore said: “We are already given the mandate to set up a new factory in Vadodara.” Elaborating, he said, “We have bought land and construction is now beginning.” He said that the company hopes to invest close to Rs 1,000 crore across various phases in the Vadodara plant that is expected to be among the company’s largest factories globally. “We will be going ahead with our phase one of our projects. Around Rs 220 crore is expected to be invested in the first phase,” he said.

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