Gibson Engineering – focused on building the only brand that matters…YOURS!
We’re constantly on the lookout for disruptive new technologies that will give our customers a critical advantage in their efforts at profitable growth. Some of these technologies come from our long term relationships with market leaders from around the globe. Cognex, Festo, Mitsubishi, Oriental Motor, IAI and Sick each dominate in their home markets, together spending over half a billion dollars annually on R&D and new product development. This investment pays dividends for our customers, who get access to game changing products in vision, robotics, pneumatics, motion and machine control. Our focus has to be on more than just new “high cool-factor” products, we need to know how these products can enhance and improve our customer’s productivity, competitiveness and profitability. By fielding a sales team consisting of graduate engineers who have experience on the customer’s side of the table we clearly understand the importance of return on investment. We’re driven to safeguard one of our customer’s most precious resources – time. It is clear to us that the best way for us to be successful is by building the only brand that matters…YOURS!
How a distributorship manages their line card says a lot about them. Some look for market share leaders, with an eye to serving the largest potential customer base. Some add any line they can with the thought that the more names in their portfolio the more likely somebody will buy something. Here at Gibson Engineering we turn down over a dozen vendors a year, and in times of market depression like the one we’re hopefully coming out of that number goes way up. Over the past year we’ve declined offers to add two or three new vendor relationships a month. Sometimes we get looked at like we’re crazy for turning down so many new lines and new business opportunities. The problem for us is that the last thing our customers need is for us to start wasting their time with a bunch of me-too products that won’t do anything to make them more successful. It doesn’t matter what it might do to our bottom line, if it won’t grow a customer’s bottom line we’re not interested. Not only that, but our most important credo at Gibson is that we put the highest level of application knowledge at the point of sale. The more product lines we add the less likely our people will be able to add intellectual value to those products, and it’s technical value add that makes us who we are. A good example of a product that got our attention and was added to our mix is RobotUnits. They are an Austrian supplier of machine framing and conveyors with a US headquarters in New Jersey. We had avoided getting involved in the extruded aluminum business based on our impression that there wasn’t sufficient differentiation among the major suppliers. Then we got introduced to RobotUnits and were so impressed by their joining technology and their lean approach to serving the widest application space with the fewest parts, that we expanded our building and invested in the raw materials, the cutting saw and the handling hardware to duplicate the supplier’s design and fabrication capability at our own facility in Norwood, MA. It has been a fun product to introduce to customer engineers and assemblers, who’s first response when we ask to have some time to show them the product is “oh no, not another aluminum machine frame supplier.” So far, those who give us the time to show the product have been universally impressed. In every case where someone in our audience has assembled competitive products they’ve seen the value in RobotUnits. Add quick delivery to the mix based on local supply and the value proposition for our customers increases. We’re on the lookout for lines like RobotUnits because we’re focused on building the only brand that matters…YOURS!
Gibson has trained thousands of customer engineers in the key disciplines we serve. There are monthly classes available with topics including robotics, machine vision, machine and motion control. These are training classes where attendees get to participate in hands-on exercises, developing code and working on real applications. One of the key reason’s for our devotion to training is that it helps customers fully leverage their automation dollars. Today’s automation products are feature filled toolboxes, and the more knowledgeable our customers are on the tools in those toolboxes the more efficient and competitive they’ll be. You’ve paid for all the tools inside the products you’ve purchased, and our mission is to make sure you get the maximum return on that investment. Being efficient and competitive helps build the only brand that matters….YOURS!
We’ve all heard the old saying about how you can tell the pioneers, they’re the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs. One of the concerns with implementing leading edge disruptive technologies is has the support structure and documentation caught up with the product. Sometimes new technology gets introduced to the market before the support infrastructure is in place or the technical documentation has been translated to English. While we often discuss these new technologies with customers for specific applications where they solve a current problem or provide a key advantage in a new product being developed, we’re clear on when they are ready for the market. The last thing a project engineer or new product development team needs are surprises and delays in getting their project online. When you work with Gibson you are working with a team that is well connected to our vendors technical resources. We spend time cultivating relationships with the product development teams of our key vendors, often allowing us unique access to answers with a shorter response time than most. We’ve made multiple visits to Japan and Germany for this purpose, and the proximity to Cognex helps us work as a seamless team when implementing new products and technologies. The bottom line for our customers is shortened time to market, quicker development cycles and increased return on investment, once again helping us provide value to the only brand that matters…YOURS!
