Rieter is one of the technology leaders in the field of staple fiber spinning. Since the company was established, Rieter claims their innovation momentum has been a powerful driving force for industrial progress. With increasing market share of the product in India, Prasanta Deka, Market Head (India), Rieter India, speaks exclusively to Textile Value Chain their new digital offering ‘ESSENTIAL’, the post-sale support, and expectations from the government. Edited excerpts.
How is your post sale support and how are you ensuring the long-life of your machines?
Rieter already has in place successful Sales and After Sales service setup in India since 1995. Rieter enables spinning mills to achieve high efficiency rates and a competitive advantage over their entire life cycle. Through premium, innovative parts and in-house expertise, Rieter maintains and enhances the performance of existing spinning machines.
To improve lifetime, productivity and/or quality of existing equipment, Rieter offers modernization solutions: retrofits and upgrades which enhance the performance of old generation machines over its lifetime to be competitive to new generation machines. Performance Optimization Services help mills to grow. Through a detailed on-site analysis of the spinning mill, from fiber preparation to end spinning, Rieter identifies potential performance improvements and ways to reduce variable cost. The implementation of recommended solutions enables customers to achieve their specific requirements and strategic goals.
To meet constantly growing requirements, Rieter fundamentally redefined services and offers the most complete range of services on the market. From installation along the entire product life cycle, Rieter experts help customers on their road to success.
What are the top 5 ways your machines are different from others.
Rieter creates value for customers by system competence, innovative solutions, excellent after sales service and global presence. To the key issues for the competitiveness of spinning mills, the company presents value-adding innovations that offer:
- High and above all consistent yarn quality.
- Reduction of the conversion cost.
- Increasing the raw material yield.
- Decrease in the energy consumption.
- Increase in flexibility to respond to demand changes in the market.
How are you ensuring the ease-of-operation of your machines and how are you ensuring that operating your machine is easily communicated to various people?
Rieter is well aware of the requirements for spinning-mill systems in terms of automation and logistics. It goes without saying that the customer’s specific wishes are valued by Rieter.
With ‘ESSENTIAL’ – the new Rieter Digital Spinning Suite, it makes possible to operate and control spinning mills with just a few clicks. ‘ESSENTIAL’ leverages digital technology for the textile value creation. The system provides meaningful key performance indicators and visualizes improvements for the entire spinning process. It integrates Rieter’s digital offerings, provides customized interfaces to ERP systems and connects third-party machines. With comprehensive and clearly arranged digital analytics this powerful tool supports the management in order to strengthen the expertise of mill staff, eliminate inefficiencies and optimize costs.
What are the new machines you are coming up with and what are the key pain points of the mill owners are addressed from that.
It is very important that a spinning mill production that is profitable now, also remains profitable in the future. A Rieter system is more than the combination of Rieter machines. Buying a Rieter system means producing the right yarn with consistent quality and at competitive cost, taking advantage of Rieter’s system expertise and technical support over the lifetime of the equipment and leveraging system integration in terms of material flow and digitization. These would be key concerns of any mill owner where Rieter system can contribute to their success.
At ITMA 2019, Rieter presented a comprehensive range of innovations for all four spinning mill systems established on the market. These innovations are aimed at reducing the raw material, energy and labor costs while increasing productivity and flexibility in the spinning mill. Rieter also presented new solutions for the production of innovative yarns and the automation and flexibility of existing systems, as well as the further development of the digital platform ESSENTIAL.
Let me briefly talk about our innovations: The blowroom VARIOline with the new UNIclean B 15 brings significant improvements in terms of energy consumption and the cleaning result for all spinning processes. The same applies to the new high-performance card C 80, which offers an unrivaled level of productivity.
To increase the cost-effectiveness of the ring spinning and compact-spinning process, Rieter revealed the new comber E 90, the new roving frame F 40, the piecing robot ROBOspin – one of the highlights of the ITMA 2019 – and two different compacting units that can easily be installed on and removed from a ring spinning machine: COMPACTdrum and COMPACTeasy.
Innovations that bring considerable improvements in efficiency for the rotor spinning process were also presented. The draw frame module RSB-Module 50 can be used in combination with the high-performance card C 80 and can be configured to a highly efficient direct process with the new semi-automated rotor spinning machine R 37 or the fully automated rotor spinning machine R 70. Both machines are characterized by low energy consumption, high productivity and high machine availability with low raw material costs. Rieter also introduced the economical air-jet spinning process for highest quality yarns made from 100% combed cotton.
All these innovations were received very positively by the many customers that Rieter welcomed at the trade fair. Rieter therefore achieved an important milestone in the implementation of its corporate strategy and is now focusing on the successful market launch.
What are your expansion plans in India?
Our production facility in Pune is part of our global network of operations. We produce here machines for the local and the global market. With ‘operational excellence’, Rieter is constantly working to streamline all its processes to achieve shorter lead times and greater flexibility.
We have developed the capacity required for Rieter to cater to the Indian market with all planned investments been executed. It is always a challenge to foresee how the industry will develop in future. Any additional investment into Indian production will depend on the market need in future.
As a manufacturer of Yarn machineries, please send me the challenges you face in India. What are your expectations from the Government?
Indian Spinning Industry is quite advanced with latest technology machines. However, we still have 60% of installed spindles which are more than 10 years old. While many new units came up with Central and State investment schemes, old stand-alone units are unable to modernize and upgrade their technologies due to lack of sufficient funds. Even though Rieter has developed upgrades and retrofits for such old stand-alone mills, customers are unable to take the benefits due to lack of funds.
Another challenge for our customer is investment cost. It is important to understand the total value of offering in the long run for a system offering like Rieter. Spinning is capital intensive and it is important that the equipment deliver long term values to maximize return over the life cycle of plant. Lower initial investment with no long term values may not be the right decision.
Global textile industry is moving towards digitalization and e-management systems across the value chain. The challenge is to make our customers aware about the need of such digital suite to enhance plant efficiency, flexibility and optimize maintenance cost in the long run.
By- Swaminathan Balasubramanian, TVC Editorial Team
