Bystronic plans new Americas headquarters

Figure 1. Bob St. Aubin, president, Bystronic Inc., shares digital representations of the new headquarters that the company is building in Hoffman Estates, Ill. The 165,000-sq.-ft. building is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2019.

North American metal fabricators aren’t the only ones bullish on the future of manufacturing. Bystronic Inc. has announced that it is building a new facility west of Chicago just seven years after moving its headquarters to Elgin, Ill.

“This is how big our commitment is here in the U.S.,” said Alex Waser, CEO, Bystronic Group, referring to the new 162,000-sq.-ft. facility, which will contain the company’s largest “experience center” in the world—a 30,000-sq.-ft. demonstration area for Bystronic machines and cells.

The new building (see Figure 1), which also will be the headquarters for Bystronic’s South American business, triples the size of Bystronic’s current home. The reason for the extra space is that the company also plans to manufacture equipment in the U.S., making it one of the few fabricating machine tool companies to do that. Bob St. Aubin, Bystronic Inc.’s president, said laser cutting systems will be the first products manufacturing in the new facility, with the possibility for more products in the future.

“The last piece of the puzzle for us was manufacturing in the U.S.,” St. Aubin said. “This is very emotional for me. It’s like a dream come true.”

Bystronic Group has a manufacturing presence in Europe and China, so doing the same in the U.S. made sense, considering it’s one of the company’s major markets, St. Aubin said. Bystronic Group has manufacturing locations in Neiderönz, Switzerland; Gotha, Germany; Tianjin, China; Shenzen, China; and a machine refurbishment center in Brasov, Romania. It has 2,500 employees worldwide.

Johan Elster, head of business unit markets, Bystronic Group, said that when he assumed his role in 2009, he realized that the company needed to be closer to a majority of its metal fabricating customers, which meant a location in the Midwest. Bystronic had been located in New York for more than 20 years before relocating to Elgin, Ill.

He added that the move has been very good for the company, as it has been able to expand its business aggressively in the last five years.

“We’re now in the middle of the sheet metal market in the U.S.,” Elster said. “This is really the place to be in our business.”

Metal fabricators visiting the Bystronic headquarters will get the opportunity to take in all of the company’s latest technological and software advances in an advanced showroom. The “experience center” will house laser cutting machines, integrated automation and storage solutions, flexible bending systems, tube and profile processing systems, and software demonstration areas. The goal is to show fabricators how sheet metal products are manufactured in the age of advanced automation, digital networking, and intelligent services.

St. Aubin said the new location, which is close to O’Hare International Airport (see Figure 2), also will provide ample space for training. The building will have two large rooms, one of which will overlook the equipment showroom, and two smaller rooms dedicated to training, almost tripling the training space when compared to the Elgin facility. St. Aubin added that this additional space is very important as metal fabricators increasingly desire thorough employee training to accompany any investment in equipment or software.

Figure 2. Sven Künkels, COO, Bystronic Group; Alex Waser, CEO, Bystronic Group; Johan Elster, head of business unit markets, Bystronic Group; Bob St. Aubin, president, Bystronic Inc.; and Cornelia Gehrig, CFO, Bystronic Group prepare to break ground at the site of the new Bystronic Inc. headquarters on Interstate 90, just west of Chicago.

Bystronic Inc. currently employs about 165 people in the U.S., 45 of which work in Elgin. When the new building is open and manufacturing is up and running, that number could grow to around 100 employees.

Construction on the new facility is slated to be finished in the summer of 2019.