Located in the state Maharashtra at the central-west of India, Pune is famous for warm weather, many green areas, as well as its educational institutes. Surrounding the city and on the way to Mumbai, many companies set foot to produce various products. And actually, we had the pleasure to visit two of our partners Burckhardt Compression and Oerlikon Balzers in the outskirts of Pune.
Visiting the coating plant of Oerlikon Balzers Coating India
We had the honour to visit the office of our gold partner Oerlikon Balzers in Pune. The company supplies manufacturing industries with PVD coating, which is a sort of thin film for mechanical and electronic purposes. We had the great opportunity to visit their manufacturing plant, learning about the process of coating as for instance drills and gear wheels for cars. Some of the industries Oerlikon Balzers is serving are the automobile industry with automotive components, aerospace materials and biomedical solutions such as dental drills. In fact, coating solutions are highly demanded by many industries. Pravin Shirse, Managing Director of Oerlikon Balzers – stressed that they receive five million orders annually.
Some facts about Oerlikon Balzers India
In the initial phase of setting up the plant in Pune, Oerlikon Balzers experienced some challenges in terms of bringing prices down of their high-quality Swiss products to meet Indian price standards. Special about Oerlikon Balzers subsidiaries in India are that they provide coating solutions not only locally, but also internationally with focus on the Asian market.
Assembly production visit
Especially for our engineering and mechatronics students, visiting the manufacturing site of Oerlikon Balzers was a memorable highlight. Business unit heads walked us through each process of high-quality coating. The company not only coats new products, but also recoats and regrinds used component to increase their lifetime and guarantee that the quality remains sustainable.
We enjoyed the highly collaborative and interesting visit at Oerlikon Balzer’s office. A special thank you to Pravin Shirse, MD Regional Executive-India & South East Asia and his colleagues for warmly welcoming us at their office and making the visit truly inspiring and engaging!
Burckhardt Compression– state-of-the- art reciprocating compressor technologies
«We keep reciprocating gas compressors running endlessly at lowest life cycle costs, long running times and highest availability» – this is what Burckhardt Compression promising to their customers. In the outskirts of Pune, we were warmly welcomed at their assembly plant of our silver partner Burckhardt Compression. Burckhardt Compression India is the largest entity outside Switzerland for manufacturing of valves, unloaders, actuators and lanterns. Some of industries Burckhardt Compression serves are upstream oil and gas and industrial gas industry. The company’s core competences focus on Y-Frame API 618 Process Gas Compressors, Laby® Standard Packages and Standard High-Pressure Compressors.
Sustainability
Sustainability is highly valued at Burckhardt Compression. 40% of the overall energy consumption is generated by solar panels at the Kondhapuri plant. This is an impressive amount since their machines are highly intensive energy machines.
Thank you very much to Milind Wagle – General Manager of BCIN, Santosh Kumar – Assistant Manager and their colleagues for providing us insights into Burckhardt Compression’s operations, as well as for giving us a tour around the manufacturing and assembly facility.
Yoga
A cultural highlight of our visit was having the opportunity to practice Yoga in Pune, the city of Yoga. Given the warm weather in the early evening, we had the chance to hold the lesson outside. For many of us, it was the first time to practice yoga. We were given a glimpse of some general yoga poses “asanas”, sun greeting “surya namaskar” and different breathing exercises. A very unique experience was to do a short sequence of “Laughter Yoga”, which promises great physiological as well as psychological benefits