A groundbreaking concept for India intralogistics

When you visit the new KION India facility on the outskirts of Pune, it quickly becomes clear that there is much more to this new location than just the manufacturing halls installed.

“To be a leader, it is not only about having good ideas concerning what to fill the manufacturing halls with, but you also need good ideas for the entire concept of the new facility – making sure that customers will feel their needs are being met, ensuring the well-being of your employees, practicing sustainable aspects in terms of the environment, but also paying attention to the local community,” explains Sunil Gupta, President at KION India.

Ching Pong Quek, member of KION’s Executive Board and Chief Asia Pacific Officer, said there were many takeaway for visitors at today’s event. "We are now able to provide the capacity that the market here demands and they now understand how committed we are to this market because we have really put a lot of resources to accommodate them." He added, "and our new complex represents the most state-of-the art facility in this industry here in India so that we can fulfill the demands of customers requiring high-performance equipment and vehicles.”

Sustainable features in 'Factory 2.0'

The new manufacturing facility sits on 25 acres with three assembly lines, machine shop, paint shop, parts warehouse & R&D; all under one roof and an investment of roughly EUR 15 million. From a sustainability standpoint, the company has gone with a solar panelling strategy, planted 200 fully grown trees, introduced bio farming for growing vegetables for employee use and implementing a water treatment system that recycles and treats water used on-site.

“From a customer perspective, if you see our new ‘Factory 2.0’, we have added 3 new components: a comprehensive quality testing facility, which enables the testing and simulation of the trucks’ operating conditions, a new training center, which upgrades our customer capabilities as well as the ability to run the vehicles longer, and a forklift operating school to lift the skill levels for our customers and their operators in terms of safety,” Johnson MRV, Vice President of Sales.

According to Quek, India represents a good growth story for the global intralogistics provider. “The market has been growing in the past five years at almost 20 percent annually, and in the upcoming next five years, we forecast growth to be somewhere around 15 to 20 percent.

The new facility is not only about expanding growth in terms of industrial truck sales and services, but also in areas such as automation and digital transformation with innovative software solutions for managing warehouses and maintaining truck fleets.

“India is just in the beginning of an automation journey for the warehouse space. It is driven both by customer preferences and the growth of e-commerce. There is also a harmonization among taxes in the various Indian states while India is also freeing up the rules of foreign exchange investments, which drives the market and will lead to a huge transformation,” notes Susanna Schneeberger, also a member of KION’s Executive Board and its Chief Digital Officer, adding, “India is extremely important from an IT and software competency perspective. Many of the best talents in the world are educated here, and I believe that we can leverage that potential much better in the future with our set-up here in Pune.”

Several brands from a single provider

A very noticeable step in this digital direction within the Indian market is have KION brand Dematic under the same roof as the industrial truck production. The aim is to send the message that customers across the country can receive every solution they are looking for from a single provider – KION India.

“With our launch today, I want our Indian customers to understand that Dematic is very active now in India, that we are serious about Indian business and that we understand it well and we are extremely eager to work with them," says an enthusiastic Sachin Daware, DGM and head of Dematic India.

“Today we are celebrating how far we have come in these last several months, but I want everyone who is attending to think about what we have placed on our inauguration stone several months ago - Sarve bhavantu sukhinah sarve santu niramayah’. It translates to a desire to ensure that all who come here should feel happiness, a sense of well being and be free of burdens. This facility has so much more it wants to fulfill to have a long run,” sums up Gupta. After all, everyone knows that being a market leader is more than just having good business ideas.