Value orientation for success – values create future

The year 2015 is an especially memorable one for Pilz: - Opening of the first production site outside Europe – in Jintan, China - Construction of new Peter Pilz Production and Logistics Centre in Ostfildern and expansion into Pilz Campus - New logo visually underlines positioning as a supplier of complete solutions for safety and automation. - Pilz brings own web-based visualisation software PASvisu onto the market - The number of employees will exceed 2000 this year for the first time ever. So the signs point to growth at Pilz. Its values and core beliefs are the springboard.

In just the same way that rubbing along with your fellow humans in private life depends on common rules and codes of behaviour, cooperation within the company is based on a time-honoured bedrock of values. At Pilz, these roots can be traced back to Christian principles. The values that we practise include mutual appreciation and treating one another with respect, as well as honesty, openness, loyalty, reliability, helpfulness and diligence. The notion of the staff member who thinks and acts entrepreneurially is enshrined in the mission statement. As a family business, Pilz is also defined by its staff. The image it presents in the marketplace and to customers bears the hallmarks of trust, reliability and courage.

Trust means commitment

For years, products and solutions by Pilz have been ensuring that wherever hazardous movements or events can occur in factory halls, e.g. from presses or CNC machinery, or in the public domain in cable cars, fairground rides, theatres, rail technology or large buildings, people are still safe and protected from harm. This is all dependent on trust in Pilz’s technology, and that is a major commitment.

The courage to innovate

Pilz offers complete automation solutions based around its core skill of safety – in everything from the sensor technology to the control systems and actuators. Since this year, custom visualisation has therefore also been added to the portfolio.

The web-based visualisation solution PASvisu gives the user a complete overview of the automation. Using this web-based software solution opens up new possibilities in machine operation, monitoring, analysis and maintenance. Embedding the visualisation solution into a plant’s control concept is a key factor in its performance. It was precisely this philosophy that guided us from very early on in the development of PASvisu in 2012: users of Pilz control solutions can access the machine control system’s entire data stock for visualisation tasks, enabling them to operate, diagnose and monitor all aspects of a plant.

In common with all its core products, Pilz also had PASvisu developed entirely in-house: by a team of developers and engineers from Ostfildern and the software development centre in Cork, Ireland. Such complex proprietary developments above all call for courage, alongside expertise and the requisite resources. Courage, because for all the plans and forecasts drawn up, there is never any guarantee or assurance of success. A new product only qualifies as an innovation if the market accepts it. The mere fact of being technology leader does not make a company successful. Pilz’s relish for technology and innovation lends wings to this courage to innovate.

Industrie 4.0 needs reliability

Over recent decades Pilz has built up a wealth of experience through developing new products, using applications and actively participating in many standardisation committees; it can now draw on that experience in tackling the challenges of the future in the shape of Industrie 4.0.

Development takes place in steps. Anyone who remembers the convergence of mechanical and electronic engineering will know that it wasn’t without its hiatuses or free from suspicion in both camps. Industrie 4.0 will be a similar affair. The current debate revolving around the standards required reflects the laborious process involved in handling growing integration and the advent of the Internet in factory halls.

From the ’80s and ’90s right through to today, Pilz has been instrumental in standardising machine safety and – as independent sources confirm – has made industrial history.

Together we can create Industrie 4.0

Pilz aims to demonstrate trust, reliability and courage in actively shaping the future, including when it comes to Industrie 4.0. Through its participation in the German government’s Research Alliance, the medium-sized enterprise has been helping to bring on Industrie 4.0 right from the outset. Industrie 4.0 as an initiative first took shape in that central advisory body on research policy to which Managing Partner Susanne Kunschert was appointed in 2010. Pilz has successfully lobbied for safety, as a critical factor for the success of Industrie 4.0, to be enshrined in the recommendations for action presented to the German government. We will continue to work on creating common, practicable standards in committees such as the Industrie 4.0 Alliance of the state of Baden-Württemberg and the SmartFactory KL research platforms – always with an eye to safety and security.

Pilz is familiar with the process needed for compiling such standards: the company helped to establish and define it for machine safety, both in its early days and in the ensuing decades. Today, users and mechanical engineers can rely on established standards and directives. Pilz can be proud of that. Because it is of inestimable value in our modern industrial society. 

This standardisation process is also essential for security. Industrie 4.0 needs reliable standards for security, otherwise the solutions will not be practicable. As an ambassador of safety, Pilz considers this to be an important task for the coming years that will need to be tackled together.

Making room for values

The automation market is fast-moving, forcing companies such as Pilz to develop continually. If common values such as trust, reliability and courage as well as the corresponding management culture are to develop and be practised, they need leeway – both intellectual and physical.

And Pilz has created such leeway with the new Peter Pilz Production and Logistics Centre. The aim was to erect a building that meets both present and future technical and environmental requirements. Pilz wants to promote a beneficial environment, not only by protecting the natural world around it or by being a good neighbour to the adjacent residential area and industry park, but also within Pilz itself. It wants people – whether staff members or guests – to feel at ease in the new Production and Logistics Centre.

The building is merely a construct. It is people who fill the building with life and give it meaning. This was the idea that helped the Pilz Campus take shape together with the new Production and Logistics Centre. Production and production-related departments under one roof, and all other departments on a single site: the transfer of Production together with Goods Inward, Dispatch and the warehouse to the new building expands and improves the working environment for the other departments, most notably Development, which has space for its laboratories and offices in the former production building.

Campus of short distances

It is almost impossible to put a value on this proximity and the resulting quality of cooperation on the campus of short distances. All departments continually receive feedback on their work and a mutual understanding of each other’s work takes shape. There is greater transparency. Interface problems between individual groups are reduced. So the distances in question are short both in a physical sense and an intellectual sense, too. We have created conditions that are simply beneficial here. It means Pilz can give its staff the space to join forces here to “create” things – the Swabians like to use the word “schaffen” with all its undertones of industriousness – in keeping with Pilz’s values.

The economic development of our company reveals how this emphasis on values is paying dividends economically: Pilz comprehensively achieved its revenue targets for the first three quarters, and on that basis the company expects 2015 to bring similarly healthy growth to 2014. Pilz is equally seeing its employee total grow steadily, and this year the figure will exceed 2000 for the first time ever. Values create future!