“Many people forget this, but we’ve only been commercially active since 2010,” begins Helmut De Roovere. He launched the now indisputable market leader in 2007, together with Luc De Ceuster. This year, the milestone of 200 installations was surpassed without problem, and the Belgian company owes that to its flexible, yet easy to use standard products that reduce the automation of turning, milling and recently also grinding machines to child's play.
"Given that we ourselves originate from the machining branch, we know only too well how important it is to limit the set-up and changeover times of the entire process to just a few minutes. That we’ve stolen a lead on other providers is now well known. But that alone won’t cut it: it also comes down to installing our Turn and Mill-Assist Series at our customers in a qualitative and customer-oriented way. That we succeed in this is evidenced by the many success stories on our website and the fact that every week we get to hear from our customers again and again,” De Roovere declares. Meanwhile, we’re counting down to 250 installations and over and again we’re seeing that - irrespective of the brand, model or age of CNC machine we’re talking about - it's our service that makes the difference. The knowledge that we’ve accrued in the meantime will also stand our future customers in good stead. Furthermore, installation and service are provided by our own personnel, whereby we keep this all completely under our control and which we have also optimized in cooperation with each machine supplier. Our customers are able to see this on their work floor right away.
Today's customer is often looking for a long term solution and this fits completely within RoboJob’s philosophy. De Roovere explains: “Our customers right from the very beginning have now already been working without interruption for 4 years with their Turn-Assist or Mill-Assist and often have commissioned a second, third, fourth and even fifth system. That not only testifies to the quality, ease of use and broad applicability of our products, but in particular, to the strength of our service provision. Furthermore, in recent years customers have been able to add new extensions to their existing system, as a result of which they can spread their investment across the widest possible range of products. Even for products that they thought they couldn’t possibly make today.”
RoboJob can present impressive figures for the Benelux, but also abroad it’s going really well. The German market, which is the leader for the entire metalworking industry is the largest market for RoboJob. “With the introduction of Industry 4.0, which has a large support base in Germany, we are expecting that an exponential growth of our systems will follow. This growth has already started in part this year and we’re already seeing this in our increasing export figures. The step to automation must be made nowadays, simply because without automation it will become extremely difficult for businesses to survive."
The Belgian specialist in CNC automation continues to attract new partners and these aren’t the minnows. In the meantime, in the Benelux we’re working with virtually all machine suppliers. In Germany, the entire Mazak network has chosen for RoboJob and the largest Doosan dealers and local Okuma dealers also have RoboJob in their portfolio. In addition, internationalization is spreading further to Scandinavia, England and even Australia and New Zealand, where Okuma, Nakamura, Hedelius, Haas, Fanuc, Brother, Hurco, Takisawa and others are now listed among the distributors. It’s now clear that RoboJob has grown to become the standard in the market.
"It’s just not in our nature to rest on our laurels,” says De Roovere, already looking ahead. "To continue to grow, we need to continue to build on the modular extensions to our standard products. This way our customers can always enjoy the latest technology and in turn can continue to offer the most competitive rates and delivery times to their clients. This is the only way to keep the machining industry in Western Europe.”
What can still be hoped for in the New Year? “There is 'something big' in the pipeline," De Roovere reveals. " I can’t say too much about it now. But you can count on it that this is going to stir up a lot of dust and it will once again give our customers a strong boost when it comes to their output, efficiency and flexibility.”