About the author: Xavier Conesa
Xavier Conesa is the CEO of Kapture.io, a family business that has passed from generation to generation for 94 years. After almost a century of adapting to market demands, he has specialized in the digitization of data with Kapture.io software and tells us in this interview how he sees the future of the sector, coinciding with the imminent publication of the guide “Enemies of Caliber and Quality“..
- About the author: Xavier Conesa
- Tecnomatrix is a company with 94 years of history in a constantly changing industry. What is the secret?
- It must not be easy to know how to adapt to so many changes.
- If each generation has adapted to the market, what challenges has your generation encountered?
- Does the market constantly offer challenges?
- In 94 years, the company has had to face major economic crises such as those of 1992 and 2008. What will be the keys to withstand the crisis resulting from Covid-19?
- Can we say that a company that has not taken the step towards digitalization is already late?
- The guide will be a new step, but you have been sharing checking fixture and gauge secrets for more than a decade. Where did you get the idea to blog about such a specific aspect?
- With so many years of experience and if you had to make a forecast, where would you say the industry is heading?
Tecnomatrix is a company with 94 years of history in a constantly changing industry. What is the secret?
The secret has been to be flexible. In all these years we have touched many technologies, but basically it was all about listening to the market, seeing what it needed, what we were experts in, and offering solutions. We have done everything. We made molds for glass bottles and also molds for Bakelite parts, plugs and so on. We have been manufacturing all those tools that were made in precision mechanical construction and at each moment we were giving a solution to what the market was asking for. Obviously, when bakelite was no longer used, we stopped making bakelite molds and replaced them with forging molds for automobiles. Then we made sheet metal stamping dies for 30 years and when this went to countries where it was more economical to manufacture them, we started making checking and gauging tools, which required a lot of precision. In fact, we have adapted to the market and with the same resources we have been seeing where we could provide solutions. This has allowed us to be 94 years old.
“In these 94 years we have touched many technologies, but basically it was all about listening to the market, seeing what it needed, what we were experts in and offering solutions.”
It must not be easy to know how to adapt to so many changes.
Now we have been doing what we are doing for 20 years. We have not changed much, but we have had periods of 10, 15 or 20 years in which we have done certain activities and then we have had to change. My grandfather adapted, my father adapted and we have had to adapt. We did not know how to do what my father did, which was tooling, but my brother and I knew how to do quality controls and we started to do them with the same machinery and the same people. This flexibility is what has allowed us to move forward.
If each generation has adapted to the market, what challenges has your generation encountered?
The most important challenge was that we found the need to diversify geographically, to export. And to grow, to be big enough to be able to take on large projects and to be able to diversify instead of depending on a single client or a single country. Another challenge was innovation, we had to do it and that’s why we developed software. The checking fixtures are only for automobiles and we thought that the software was also applicable to other sectors such as construction, pharmaceuticals or aeronautics. This is how we diversified the product and the service.
Does the market constantly offer challenges?
Yes, that is true. And now there is another challenge, which is to adapt to the flexibility required by the market in personnel planning and task planning. Managing personnel and talent is now key, it always has been, but now even more so.
In 94 years, the company has had to face major economic crises such as those of 1992 and 2008. What will be the keys to withstand the crisis resulting from Covid-19?
It is complicated to know because of the level of uncertainty. In the last 20 years we have endured well thanks to exporting to Russia, Germany or Mexico and we have seen what worked. The challenge now is that we do not know how long this crisis will last, but it is very clear that having done our homework with the commitment to digitalization and Kapture.io will allow us to move forward.
We are now generating a lot of interest in the market and cross-selling between checking fixtures and Kapture.io, giving us an image of innovation that makes customers prefer to come to us instead of looking for workshops or more traditional companies.
You have the image of being innovative, restless and if you can innovate it also means that you have resources and a healthy economy. The key will be to have done your homework before and now maintain your financial situation.
Can we say that a company that has not taken the step towards digitalization is already late?
Absolutely. And on the checking fixtures side, we see that the trend is to make more automated checking fixtures, which allow us to digitize quality controls more quickly and easily. They had always been very manual controls, without any sensorization, but now the trend is towards more machine-type checking fixtures, with shorter cycle times, where everything is measured very quickly and 100% of the production is checked, when before it was checked every two hours, once per shift or once a day. Not now, now the trend is to digitize much more to better understand the processes, have more data and make better decisions. This benefits us both in terms of checking fixtures and Kapture.io.
You are about to publish a book, The Enemies of Calibre and Quality. There is constant talk of innovation, but in your case you have been sharing solutions for many years.
To say book is a bit daring. It is more of a manual, a guide of good practices. But I think that the exposition of where we are going is accurate and is contrasted with many colleagues in the sector. If we have more than 18,000 visits per month on our blog, www.measurecontrol.com, it is not by chance, but because we have interesting content and people ask us for it.
The guide will be a new step, but you have been sharing checking fixture and gauge secrets for more than a decade. Where did you get the idea to blog about such a specific aspect?
The truth is that we gave it a lot of thought because you have the doubt of who will be interested in something so specific. So many things came together, such as having free time and a moment in 2007 when social networks were gaining momentum. We thought why not explain the little secrets or the day to day of how we do things and why. The idea has always been to explain the innovations we are making in the checking fixtures, the materials, the tests we do, etc.
Everything that is sharing is welcome and if this way we get people to follow us, people related to the sector, then perfect. One day I was chatting with a friend who mastered social networks and he told me to make a blog and that’s how it came about. Faced with a major crisis like the one in 2008, we created a blog about checking fixtures and one day I talked about the enemies of the caliber, about what aspects can cause problems when you design or manufacture a caliber.
So every week we published an enemy of the caliper and we put them together in a kind of book, which we saw that it had many downloads. We saw that with digitization through Kapture.IO and sensorization we could provide solutions to these problems intrinsic to calipers, so we have published a new version of the book “Enemies of Caliber and Quality” where we explain our contribution to the industry.
“The Enemies of Caliber and Quality is a manual, a guide of good practices. I believe that the exposition of where we are going is accurate and is contrasted with many colleagues in the sector.”
With so many years of experience and if you had to make a forecast, where would you say the industry is heading?
The sector has a very certain prognosis and I doubt that I am wrong: all the gurus say that it is heading towards total digitalization. It is not digitizing for the sake of digitizing, but to obtain data from the product processes and to be able to apply artificial intelligence. If we talk about quality, to direct all production processes to zero defects, to be able to produce with maximum quality, effectiveness and efficiency.
The future of quality is this, to digitize in order to be able to apply all the robotization, both physical robots and RPA, of processes. Data and document digitization processes that can be digitized will be done and people will be left to make decisions and not so much to do work with little added value. This is the future that awaits us and whoever does not get on board will have a hard time because they will be left out, they will be left aside.
Xavier Conesa is clear about where the industry is heading. Data digitization is already an essential reality and the 94 years of history of Tecnomatrix are a good endorsement to follow his recommendations, which we will also find in the guide “Enemies of Caliber and Quality“.
