Change is changing.

As the leading manufacturer of precision hard-fine machining systems, we have learned through the decades the significance of the term “opinion leader.” Certain competitors of ours scarcely shy away anymore from marketing 1:1 copies of our successful products. To cite a small, insignificant example: Nearly thirty years ago we were the first in the industry to paint our machines white. Look around you and note what color prevails in the machine tool market today!

The speed of innovation is the all-important catchword of our times. But what exactly does innovation mean? Or to put it another way, to what extent is innovation meaningful? An even more important question: At what point do we overwhelm our customers with too much innovation?

To me, innovation is the basis for handling resources and other important matters correctly. Other important matters include, for example, the optimization of costs, of profits, of applications, in other words the optimization of resources.

In my long service as an officer in the Swiss Army, I learned in tactical schools to put myself in my adversary’s place. At these schools, you are trained to imagine at every moment how the enemy might respond. Let us put ourselves in our major customers’ place and consider what would be right for them, based on their life and business situation.

Cost optimization is forcing us to resort to global outsourcing and run the risk of losing auxiliary skills. Companies are losing their ability to maintain full control of a process within their own operations. We are limiting ourselves to our core areas of expertise. Outside that core, we rely on knowledge from specialists. This is one reason that products resemble each other more and more nowadays.

Have the right attitude about change! To come full circle with these critical musings, I would like to describe in a few key words how we support change at my company instead of confronting it. Don’t leave one thing without doing the other. Our main focus is to remain close and responsive to the customer. Nothing is more essential than to keep finding out what the customer is concerned about or, put another way, how we can help him progress and advance.

We must be capable of listening and comprehending things, of understanding them and of devising solutions to implement them. To do so, we have to have a solid knowledge of the industry. Together with our subsidiaries, we have the greatest grinding capabilities on the world market as measured by market share. We have more than 70 apprentices at any given time in training at my company alone. This is part of our investment in the future. Drawing on this far-ranging internal expertise, we are able to see customer requirements from our customers’ perspective. Core expertise takes on a new dimension in the process. Broad support for this core expertise is essential. The optimum intermeshing of technology skills makes the difference between winning and losing the game. What could be more typically Swiss than this striving to work on and improve details?

Remember that we can do nothing to change the rhythm of change. We ourselves are an integral part of the orchestra and we must either play in time, or.....

Fred Gaegauf is managing director of Fritz Studer AG, Thun, Switzerland, the leading company in the cylindrical grinding division of Körber Schleifring GmbH, represented in the US by United Grinding Technologies, Inc. For decades, Studer has been synonymous with innovation. Among its many inventions are the mineral-cast Granitan machine bed and “all-in-one” grinding technology.