Company visit at VITRONIC

On 5th May 2015 the senior bilingual economics class visited its next door neighbour, the company VITRONIC. Even if you do not know the company’s name, you will get to know one of their best selling products if you drive too fast along Mainzer Straße or Kaiser-Friedrich-Ring in Wiesbaden. 

Traffic Technology, however, is only one of the company’s divisions, as we learned during our company visit.

On behalf of VITRONIC Mr Bär (COO) welcomed us and presented the company, which is a medium-sized, owner managed enterprise with over 600 employees worldwide. VITRONIC’s headquarter is in Wiesbaden, additionally it has international subsidiaries in several countries. We learned that VITRONIC offers products in the areas of Logistics, Industry and Traffic Technology. All their products are based on image processing and laser technology. This technology is employed in the industrial sector for inspection and quality checking, in the logistic sector for measuring and weighing and in the traffic sector for traffic enforcement, toll collection and vehicle identification.

Due to the global market on which VITRONIC is operating, the marketing and the design of their products have to consider intercultural aspects with regard to distribution and promotion. Furthermore, the product has to be adapted to environmental conditions. For example selling speed enforcement traps to Saudi Arabia, which is a very important market for VITRONIC, requires among other things the installation of air conditioning due to the higher temperatures and the adherence to regional legislation.

After the general presentation, Mr Pörner (CFO) gave us an insight into the financial sphere of the company. Owing to the project work the company’s controlling is based on project-related cost-unit accounting.  

 

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take more pictures due to security measures.

Finally, we visited the production facilities. Each division is located on a different floor. First, we had a look at the production of the traffic enforcement devices. We were astonished by the fact that the production of a traffic enforcement trap is predominately based on manual work and the expertise of electronics technicians who have to test the product a lot in order to ensure the operational capability of the product.  

Afterwards, we looked at the products needed for toll collection and vehicle identification and at the end of our tour we visited the logistics division.

All in all, it was very interesting to receive information about the company which is located right next to our school. It showed us that medium-sized companies are mostly unknown to us although they make up such important part of the German economy.

As a result, we can say that a visit at VITRONIC can definitely be recommended especially to our “colleagues” in the field of electronics technology.

We would like to thank the people at VITRONIC for their warm welcome and for taking their time to give us an insight into the company.

 

Melanie Wicht-Kruschwitz
Date: 05/2015