More Opportunities

Rolf Slatter makes time for us. Time which he actually doesn’t have. But the new company building is a matter for the boss. He can hardly contain his excitement. There’s plenty of space here. And a lot of room for new opportunities.

As managing director of Sensitec Rolf Slatter has been in charge of the company’s development for more than 13 years. During this time, the company has been growing successively – strategically clever but with regard to room, growth happened rather organically. They were running more and more out of space. “We managed to cope with it,” relates Slatter, “but it had not been ideal for quite some time because the available space couldn’t match the growth of the residing companies.” Thus, the time had come to look for a new location. Sensitec found it in Wetzlar, in Schanzenfeldstraße 2, in the industrial estate Spilburg. The modern building houses production, sales, service, development, and administration – with the administrative offices and development departments located on the upper floor, production and storage facilities on the ground floor. The open floor plan with 510 m² on the ground floor provided the ideal conditions to set up the production lines in the best way to ensure an optimum flow of materials. The centerpiece of sensor production consists of a completely newly installed cleanroom with an area of 260 m².

“The building has one big advantage in that essential parts of the infrastructure which are crucial to our production had already been in place,” explains Alexander Veidt, commercial manager of Sensitec GmbH since the end of 2019. A modern air conditioning system for heating and cooling keeps the environmental conditions for the production on a consistent level. The previous tenants Philips and Magna had already covered large areas of the floor with ESD-resistant flooring which are suitable to discharge electrostatic energy in a controlled manner thanks to their special design. “The new building is ideal,” enthuses Alexander Veidt. “All departments benefit from the improved location. And if necessary,” he adds, “there is always the option to enlarge these areas even further. We have a lot of room for ideas and new possibilities here.”

Excellent qualification in the sector of magnetoresistive sensors

It’s a well-known fact that new possibilities cost money and that every relocation is an investment which a company has to be able to afford in the first place. Needless to say, that Rolf Slatter is well aware of that. He explains why he is relatively at ease when looking ahead – despite the corona crisis: “Despite the current crisis, the significance of the sensor technology for future megatrends like Industrie 4.0, Smart Mobility, Smart Health, and Smart Energy remains undiminished. Our relocation helps us in facilitating further growth.” The managing directors of Sensitec are not the only ones who think so: Körber AG, the main shareholder, explicitly supported the farsighted investment in times which are not so easy. And Rolf Slatter is very grateful for that.

In fact, sensor technology systems have achieved continuous growth for years. Especially the developments in electromobility and as part of Industry 4.0 wouldn’t be possible without any sensors. New fields of application with great potential are opening up, for example in industrial robotics or medical engineering. These growth prospects are essential for Rolf Slatter. For more than a decade, he has set the stage for this: with an excellent qualification in the sector of magnetoresistive sensors from which originated various products and systems for specific fields of application. “We now have a product portfolio which is very successful in many industries and on an international basis, too,” points out Rolf Slatter. Well, there are others who claim the same, one would like to counter – but Slatter anticipates the objection: “We set ourselves apart through intense development work. And we make a difference in speed and flexibility. If we started to fight with the competition about solutions suitable for the masses in the low-price sector, we wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Customized systems for new fields of application

Therefore, Sensitec’s maxim is “advantage by technology” – and this means: to be more expedite in magnetic sensor technology than the competition and to provide their clientele with customized systems. In this manner, Sensitec develops and produces intelligent current sensors for the latest generation of electrically powered cars where the standards are very high. A comparatively young business sector is the monitoring of the condition of machines which allows predictive maintenance: That means, I do not wait to react until the machine has already become inoperative but I am able to predict when maintenance will be required. In addition to that there are new applications in the sector of medical engineering, such as biosensor technology which is about detecting certain substances and processes in bodily fluids with the help of magnetic processes.

For Rolf Slatter, however, the supreme discipline is and will be the high-end sensor technology which Sensitec develops for NASA. The Mars rovers whose movements are monitored and controlled by Sensitec sensors are usually designed for a lifespan of three to six months. The “Opportunity” rover landed on the Red Planet in January 2004 and had been active for 14 years until it presumably fell victim to a dust storm in June 2018 which lasted for several weeks. The “Curiosity” rover has been roaming Mars for 8 years now. It is planned that the new rover, “Perseverance”, will touchdown on Mars on 18th February 2021.

“These are credentials that no competitor is able to outdo,” rejoices Rolf Slatter. Of course, it was not him who came up with the rovers’ names “Curiosity”, “Opportunity”, and “Perseverance”. But they could have been his brainchildren. If you like, you may recognize in them the ingredients for his entrepreneurial recipe to success: to constantly open up new opportunities in the field of sensor technology with curiosity and perseverance. “This won’t change with the relocation to Wetzlar. Quite the contrary.” The managing director of Sensitec is confident: “Our growth may be hindered by the corona crisis at the moment but the prospects are excellent that we will continue to grow afterwards. We are well-positioned to do so in the new location.”

Additional Information:
www.sensitec.com