imaging and machine vision europe october/november 2010 www.imveurope.com


8


profile


Custom solutions


Warren Clark maps the history of NET, a distributor turned manufacturer and solutions provider


NET started life back in 1996 as a distributor, having been founded by Jean- Pierre Heinrichs (who still serves as CEO) and Peter Stoehr, who retired in 2004. Heinrichs is a physicist by profession, and immediately prior to starting NET had been working for a company that was developing video systems for endoscopy. Stoehr was already involved in distribution of cameras within a company that also dealt with many other markets, and felt that there was an opportunity to explore the vision market alone. Due to personal contact Stoehr had with the international sales director at Japanese company Teli (now Toshiba Teli), he set up NET to act as distributor for its range of cameras in Europe. ‘The first products were, of course, all analogue cameras with Camera Link interfaces,’ says Heinrichs. For much of the first year of operation, the main markets were in traditional industrial vision – but, by 1997, NET was able to bring Heinrichs’ experience to bear and move into the medical market. ‘Very soon after we started operating in the


medical market,’ says Heinrichs, ‘we found ourselves customising our solutions more and more. Over the years, this has turned us into a manufacturer as well as a distributor. In fact, today, our business breaks down at around 70 per cent manufacture, 30 per cent distribution.’ Today, application markets for NET are


split between industrial vision and medical. For industrial vision, the emphasis is less on supplying standard, off-the-shelf product lines, and more on customised solutions.


NET’s headquarters in Munich ‘We compete with many other manufacturers


on our standard product lines, where decisions are made on factors such as delivery times, product reliability and so on,’ says Heinrichs. ‘But where we really stand out is in close customer relationships and providing fully customised solutions. For example, unlike many of our competitors, we not only provide the cameras, but also the optics and lighting too. We often provide a solution with a range of options, so the customer can choose which is the best for them.’ Typical industrial vision customers are OEMs


and, to a certain extent, large end users looking to integrate vision into their own processes. ‘But industrial vision is becoming more and more complicated,’ observes Heinrichs. The plethora of interfaces available, and the growing range of applications, makes every customer’s needs unique. By contrast, NET’s work in the medical


industry is stable by comparison, where the main areas of interest are endoscopy and dentistry. ‘We have a number of long-term, loyal customers, whose needs evolve over time, but


remain more or less the same. We only supply the board cameras here. It goes into a product that belongs to our customer, so we don’t need to worry about marketing or branding etc.’ When NET first started, there were very few


Western manufacturers of camera technology; now, the landscape has changed dramatically. But one of the biggest changes that Heinrichs has noticed coincided with the advent of digital cameras. ‘When digital cameras were first introduced,’ he says, ‘some manufacturers realised the importance of software, while others didn’t. We recognised that it was the software that could provide the flexibility and customisation that our customers required. It also accentuated the need for local support, as customers need direct access to the software engineers in their own territories. ‘This meant we also had to expand our


recruitment policy. While hardware engineers knew the importance of software, and could understand the fundamentals, they weren’t really in a position to develop full software packages. As a result, we began to recruit software engineers as well.’


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