Confirmed promise to customers
17.03.2023
Interview as PDF
Interroll has continued to expand its presence in the Americas. We spoke to Richard Keely, Executive Vice President Americas, about current trends, cross-border business opportunities and the importance of flexible production.
In the previous financial year, Interroll significantly increased its sales in the Americas region. What were the main reasons?
Richard Keely: The main reason, of course, was that our customers appreciated our portfolio and the work we do for them, even in turbulent times. Sales in the project business relating to our sorting solutions have grown significantly. In this area, we scored with innovations such as our high-performance sorters and with our extensive knowledge of the North American market based on our decades-long presence. We were also able to reap the rewards of earlier investments in expanded production capacities, enabling us to meet increased demand for both follow-up and new orders. The competence and commitment of our employees played an essential role in our successful growth. Without their commitment and our personnel development measures, we would not have been able to make a greater contribution to the Group as a whole.
The competence and commitment of our employees played an essential role in our successful growth.”
Will e-commerce and automation remain important growth drivers in the Americas?
Yes, these megatrends will continue to play a significant role in determining the further development of the material-handling industry in the Americas. The pandemic has permanently changed shopping behavior and further increased consumer expectations of e-commerce. To remain a successful supplier that also serves in the omnichannel sector, we will need to shorten the period between order and delivery. Returns must also be handled with high efficiency and productivity, all of which requires speed, reliability and efficiency – hence the need for intelligent automation. Our platform offering precisely meets these requirements.
How do you view the business prospects in the various markets?
North America is a highly developed market that offers great potential and not only domestically. Many US companies operate worldwide, such as Amazon, UPS and Pepsi. They want intralogistics solutions that meet the same high-quality and performance standards worldwide. Such demands play to our strengths: As an international technology leader, we support companies across borders whether it’s Europe, Asia or the Americas. Mexico is particularly interesting in geopolitical terms. Numerous foreign companies from a wide range of sectors are considering using the country as a base for production and sales. As a result, we have stepped up our activities there to intensify customer relationships and better meet local demand. We have already successfully implemented this strategy in Brazil, having expanded our site there.
What challenges do you foresee in the future?
Our customers expect quality, simplicity and above all speed. Being able to deliver all that as quickly as possible gives them greater business value. Planned lead times for material flow projects are becoming shorter as users react more quickly to new market opportunities. Those who cannot deliver quickly and on time lose business to competitors. So, it’s important that we continue to make our production capacities more flexible in a targeted way and at the same time increase our productivity. For this reason, we rely on robotics for our production in Cañon City, Colorado, for example. We will also automate production for our rollers more extensively in Wilmington, North Carolina, in a move to significantly increase our capacity and drastically reduce response times to customer requests. In Brazil, the addition of new roller and RollerDrive cells has greatly improved our local capability regarding these platforms.
How is Interroll perceived in the market?
Our sustained success in the project business, where we have implemented solutions with leading global suppliers, has solidly confirmed our commitment to delivering quality to the market. This market standing helps us with new and follow-up orders and as a convincing reference when addressing potential customers. Our past experiences and reliability have supported us well in growing outside of the United States particularly in Mexico, Canada, and Brazil. At MODEX, a leading trade show in Atlanta, Georgia, we had the opportunity to present our company and our range of products in person for the first time since the Corona crisis. We have made substantial progress on the path to establishing Interroll as a leading brand in the Americas and increasing industry awareness of our comprehensive solution expertise in material-flow solutions.