Design Engineering – March-April 2019

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

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FluidPower:Roundtable

FLUID

POWER

range of products, which are heavily

stocked at our Canadian warehouse for

immediate delivery. This year started off

strong, meeting our growth forecasts;

however, some of our customers are expect-

ing business to soften for the second half.

Which products or product categories

are popular at the moment?

McCrudden-Festo: The hottest trend isn’t

so much a product as it is the services that

support the products. For us, that’s the

integration of pneumatic, electrical and

mechanical. For example, if I roll the clock

back, we wouldn’t have sold any pneu-

matic actuators with a mechanical bear-

ing. Today, expressed in dollars, probably

50 percent of our pneumatic actuator

business includes a mechanical bearing.

Previously, customers had to find a bear-

ing supplier, hunt through part catalogs,

align the bearing, etc. Now, they can buy

the same integrated device from one

supplier. It’s a similar story for the elec-

trical integration. We’ve really been

pushing valve terminals with electrics on

one side and pneumatics on the other.

The upside there is you don’t have to

mount and wire a third party I/O device

and you only have to mount one thing

rather than five. This kind of integration

isn’t just a Festo trend; it has become

standard in the industry.

Tourgis-Wainbee: For Wainbee, the

future trend is different than the indus-

tries we achieved growth in for 2018.

We’ve participated in a tremendous

I think most in the industry would say that finding good

talent is tough. But that’s too easy of an answer...Convincing

those with talent (and everyone has a talent) that their po-

tential is best served in the fluid power industry is the real

challenge.

• Campbell Tourgis, Vice President, Wainbee

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