Design Engineering – March-April 2019

March/April | 2019 http://www.design-engineering.com

38 FluidPower:Roundtable

FLUID

POWER

Canadian fluid power

leaders discuss the impact

of IIoT and the challenges

the industry faces.

How has business been in the last year?

Don McCrudden, VP Business Develop-

ment, Festo Canada: Our business con-

tinues to flourish and has done for quite

some time now. The one proviso is that,

when I look at Festo’s business, it’s made

up of three business units: Process auto-

mation, electrical automation and pneu-

matics. When we look at our broad based

business, our pneumatic business is great

but has nowhere near the growth of the

other two. In part, that’s because process

and electrical automation are starting out

at a much lower baseline. Pneumatics is

single digit growth but significant. Process

and electrical have much faster growth but

have a long way to go to catch up with our

pneumatics business.

Campbell Tourgis, Vice President,

Wainbee: Looking at 2018, based on the

success of our customers and suppliers,

it was our busiest and most fruitful year

on record. We experienced a tremendous

project resurgence that started about 18

months ago. Most of these initiatives were

for productivity enhancement and capital

equipment projects. We feel that was a

result of the world economy expansion

that provided our OEMs with an initiative

to stock more and build faster. Unusually

though, we had our best year ever in the

span of 10 months. Come November, the

industrial sector took a pause. Our assess-

ment is that, by November, people were

tired from a busy year and budgets had

been spent. Those factors combined with

a momentary collapse in various stock

markets at year-end due to uncertainty

around NAFTA and other political strife,

lead to this year-end slow down. Our

analysis suggests that, by mid-January, a

level of normality has resurfaced.

Frank Pirri, Sales and Product Manager,

Flodraulic Group Canada: Flodraulic

ended 2018 well above forecast and 2019,

thus far at least, doesn’t show any signs

of slowing down. I can credit this to the

introduction of a few new specialty prod-

ucts as well as our business model as a

systems integrator. Ideally, we like to work

with our customers, from the prototyping

stage to production. That allows us to

provide a complete package that includes

the hydraulic components as well as the

electronics to control them. With that

approach, we have been expanding our

current business with our existing cus-

tomers while attracting new ones.

Rob Chin, Sales Manager, MP Filtri

Canada: 2018 was a very good year that

well exceeded our forecasts. For us, this

was a result of a strong Canadian economy

in most sectors supported by our wide

The hottest trend isn’t so much a product as it is the ser-

vices that support the products. For us, that’s the integra-

tion of pneumatic, electrical and mechanical...This kind of

integration isn’t just a Festo trend; it has become standard

in the industry.

• Don McCrudden, VP Business Development, Festo
  Canada

Roudtable

2019

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