The Schmersal Group offers the world's largest programme of safety components and systems for machine safety, is one of the international market and competence leaders in this field and is present on three continents with its production plants. This is the track record after 70 years of company history. It all started very modestly ...
When 34-year-old Kurt Andreas Schmersal made his way to the Wuppertal Chamber of Industry and Commerce on 30 August 1945 to found the company K.A. Schmersal, he passed through a city that had been almost 70 percent destroyed.
When Kurt Andreas Schmersal applied to the Wuppertal Chamber of Industry and Commerce for a licence to set up his company in 1945, Ilse Zschucke was responsible for checking and approving the application. This is how the future couple met on this important day[/infotext].
The Second World War had only been over for a few months, and when the company was founded, the focus was on securing a bare livelihood. A few weeks after submitting their application to the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the brothers Ernst and Aurel Schmersal became shareholders in the young company.
The planned product programme should consist of Switches and in particular Lift switches exist. Not without reason: the company founder's father, Ernst Schmersal Senior, had already moved with his family from Stuttgart to Wuppertal in the 1920s to become a partner in a small lift company. His sons, as Master mechanic and Master electrician the necessary expertise.
Successfully utilising the spirit of optimism
Kurt Andreas Schmersal justified his business idea to the authorities by explaining that urgent repairs to lifts and in vital operations such as hospitals could be carried out without his business. Control units could not be realised. However, he was clever enough to take into account other prevailing market needs in his planning. As a result, the first products that Schmersal manufactured in the 1940s included Household appliances such as Cooker, immersion heater - and Waffle iron.
In addition, these products could be exchanged for food, heating fuel and later also for machines and materials for the construction of switches. Before the currency reform, such bartering was commonplace in the German economy.
In its founding year, the workforce consisted of three skilled workers, eight unskilled labourers and one employee. Things soon started to look up: at the beginning of the 1950s, with the start of the economic miracle, Schmersal produced switchgear, primarily limit switches, for the flourishing construction industry.
Continuous development of innovations
Schmersal invested in the development of new, innovative products at an early stage: The first Schmersal patent was built 60 years ago, on 3 November 1955, for a Switches for direct current systems registered. Another important development at this time was position switches for industry. Experts were already working on control technology in the early 1960s. This led to the first „Multivision wall“ The first German television programme, which caused a sensation in Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff's quiz show „Einer wird gewinnen“ (One will win), was controlled by Schmersal's mat switching system.
With the increasing automation of industry, the focus of development and production in the 1960s was on switchgear for mechanical and plant engineering.
In the 1970s, Schmersal was one of the first companies to start developing and producing inductive proximity switches, sensors, i.e. sensors that can detect an object without direct contact with it. Binary signal („object recognised/not recognised“). This was the start of the production of non-contact safety relays, which are in high demand today, especially in the packaging industry, due to their advantages in terms of hygienic design.
Standardised safety requirements
At the beginning of the 1980s, Schmersal opened up a new field of activity: the standardisation that was emerging at the time meant that special Safety switching devices were required. Up until 1980, almost every industry had its own machine safety regulations. The safety requirements for different areas of machine use were very different. It was not until the 1980s that uniform standards were developed, which were also harmonised at international level with the introduction of the European Single Market in the early 1990s.
The result was an increasing demand from companies for safety switching devices. Schmersal recognised this development at an early stage and aligned its product range accordingly. Not least due to technical innovations: In 1981, the AZ 15 and AZ 16 safety switches were developed and patented. They were milestones in safety technology and are still the company's best-selling switch types today.
300 patents in 70 years
To date, Schmersal has filed almost 300 patent applications for inventions. The company is currently focussing its development efforts on Programmable safety controllers and has already successfully launched several variants on the market. In autumn 2014, Schmersal presented the new programmable, modular PROTECT PSC1 safety controller, which is multifunctional.
In the field of co-operative work systems for human-robot collaboration, basic developments for safe motion monitoring were also delivered as early as the end of the 1990s, which today enable numerous robot applications worldwide.
Trend towards globalisation recognised early on
Schmersal recognised the trend towards globalisation at an early stage and systematically began to Internationalisation of sales and production. The subsidiary ACE Schmersal was founded in Brazil back in 1974. The first production site in China followed in 1999 and the company has had its own production plant in India since 2013.
Since the 1990s, Schmersal has also acquired new production sites in Germany through company takeovers. Today the group has Four production sites in Germany and three others in Asia and South America and is present in around 60 countries worldwide with subsidiaries and commercial agencies.
Industry specialist for packaging machine construction
In recent years, Schmersal's expertise has helped it to become the Industry specialists which provides consulting services, safety-related system solutions and customised products for the special requirements of food and packaging machine manufacturers. Here, the machines and systems often work at very high speeds and short cycle times. They are often integrated into complete production and/or packaging lines. As a result, when selecting and designing safety systems, care must be taken to ensure that the protective devices do not interrupt production processes or impair the productivity of the systems.
Instead, they must operate with the highest level of reliability. Schmersal safety switching devices are characterised by Durability even under adverse conditions and in 24-hour operation out. Many series - especially those that are primarily used in packaging machine construction - are designed to prevent the machine from stopping as far as possible.
The company today
Today, the Schmersal Group develops and produces around 25,000 different switchgear devices, making it one of the largest suppliers in the world. It is one of the international market and competence leaders in the field of machine safety. And this is based on a solid economic foundation: last year, turnover increased again by around seven per cent and the number of employees worldwide rose from 1,600 to 1,750 in 2014.
„We don't want to rest on our laurels; instead, we are pressing ahead with the strategic realignment we decided on a few years ago. Our aim is to further expand our market position as a system and solution provider,“ explains Philip Schmersal Managing Partner of K.A. Schmersal GmbH & Co. KG.
„We want to offer our customers holistic solutions. This also includes the Safety Consulting“, he explains. „The experts in the tec.nicum business unit, our service division, advise our customers on the selection of suitable protective equipment, for example, or carry out safety analyses of existing machines and risk and hazard assessments. Application engineering is also a service provided by tec.nicum. The focus here is on the implementation of safety-related solutions. We support our customers from initial contact through to commissioning“.
[infotext]Schmersal therefore intends to launch the Safety Consulting organisationally as well: a global network of qualified safety engineers is to be set up[/infotext].
