Part 3: We grow!
On the occasion of our 30th company anniversary, we look back on the development of INTRAVIS in a 6-part series. We shed light on where it all began, why INTRAVIS is actually called INTRAVIS, what influence a student had on our start in the plastic packaging industry, and how a vision has always driven us for 30 years now. Today: Over the years, INTRAVIS has grown from a one-man company into an established medium-sized company with more than 230 employees worldwide.
When Dr. Gerd Fuhrmann founded INTRAVIS in May 1993, he was the first and only employee of INTRAVIS. But in order to implement his project at that time, tomography equipment, he needed more employees. "When we were only a few employees, everyone still did a little bit of everything. I talked to prospective customers in the morning, soldered circuit boards in the afternoon, and ordered parts in the evening," reports Dr. Fuhrmann, who is still the CEO at INTRAVIS today.
Over time, the company's focus changed to vision inspection systems for plastic packaging and INTRAVIS have grown larger. In 2001, we reached a number of about 15 employees. However, the steadily increasing number of orders and employees increasingly pushed the premises in the Technology Park Herzogenrath (TPH), where we had our headquarters and production site since the foundation, to their limits.
New premises were finally found in the Rotter Bruch in Aachen - where INTRAVIS still develops and manufactures its systems today. Dr. Fuhrmann recalls: "Initially, we rented a single floor here. Where today is our technical center, there was production in the first years. And in our kitchen on the 5th floor was the lunch room, where the wifes of our employees prepared the lunch for them. At that time, that family feeling was implanted in the DNA of INTRAVIS which still characterizes us today."
Over the years, we added more and more rooms in Rotter Bruch. "We were always lucky that our landlord was always able to make some space available again just when we were going through another growth spurt. For example, when we were looking for a hall for our commissioning in 2009, we had already looked around the entire industrial park in Rotter Bruch. At some point, our landlord then said that he still had a large hall available in an adjacent building. We were surprised when we visited the building for the first time, because from the outside you couldn't see that it was a huge hall with high ceilings and lots of space," says our CEO who is still enthusiastic about the flexibility at our headquarters.
Today, with more than 200 employees only at the Aachen site, we produce more than 300 systems per year spread over four buildings with a total of ten floors and more than 6,300 m². In addition, a subsidiary was founded in Atlanta/USA in 2004, which today has about 20 employees.
In the next episode of our series, we'll take a look at the systems that have been with INTRAVIS for a long time and how they have changed throughout the years.
Click here for the previous articles in the series: