Pero is a family business with a tradition of more than 65 years in the field of industrial parts cleaning. They develop and produce innovative systems for cleaning workpieces made of metal, glass, ceramics, composite or combined materials. Their customers are manufacturers from all over the world who use the washing systems to clean their parts before shipping or for further process steps to achieve the highest level of cleanliness of the parts.
Interview with Michael Ickert, Manager PERO AG.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Michael Ickert: Pero’s main areas of activity are the development of industrial cleaning systems, the development of cleaning processes, the globalization and thus the implementation of sales and service partnerships worldwide.
As a member of the management board I am e.g. responsible for sales and marketing. For more than five years I have been pursuing the goal of increasing our market share internationally and finding partners in the different countries.
At the moment we focus is on countries such as Poland and Hungary, but Romania also plays a major role in our planning. Our philosophy is to have high quality products in combination with high quality service and a high efficiency in the availability of spare parts in the countries where we sell our systems. We achieve this goal with strong, local partners.
Our systems engineering comprises two areas: we offer cleaning systems on the solvent side as well as on the aqueous side. Many of our competitors only supply one or the other type of cleaning system. Due to the availability of both medias, we are also able to offer systems for the combined working process for special applications.
Our customers have the chance to come and visit one of the biggest competence centres in the world, which is at our headquarters in Königsbrunn, Germany. The PERO Centre of Competence offers more than 15 separate units available for parts cleaning tests on an area of 1,100 m². Our customers and interested parties can bring their dirty parts to PERO and evaluate together with our cleaning experts how these parts can be cleaned. As part of their experience, they will receive a cleaning report, lists the cleaning methods and results of the test as well as the chosen cleaning medium and process steps. As a final result, we will define the right system for their cleaning process.
E.E: What’s the news for 2020 about new products?
M.I: In 2020, we established a development project to design a small cleaning system that is perfectly suited for small companies starting with industrial cleaning.
For this purpose, we strongly optimized an existing system and lifted it to a new level. Our system Pero S(uper) 1A is equipped with the following facts:
- new optimized software and interface;
- perfect user manual;
- simple and intuitive mode for the operator as well as for the supported operation in case of errors.
The S(uper) 1A is a very important project in 2020, as we want to offer this system mainly to customers who do not have a large budget to invest in a huge machine, but who also need a cleaning system to solve a variety of requirements.
E.E: Which are the best-selling products this year?
M.I: This year we had numerous projects in which our customers used a combination of solvent and aqueous cleaning for the perfect solution of the cleaning requirements.
Furthermore, we had plenty of projects for our R4 and R5 cleaning systems, which are large machines that can clean massive, large parts or large quantities of up to 1000 kg.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2021?
M.I: The economic situation in combination with the Covid 19 pandemic is currently very unstable and changes on a daily base. For this reason, a forecast for 2021 is very difficult to make. About 12 to 13 months ago the worldwide crisis in the automotive industry started. Because of plenty discussion about vehicles with combustion engines in comparison to electric motors many projects have been stopped or postponed during the last months.
Provided the Covid19 pandemic is contained and remedies are found, I think that the economy will recover in slow steps in 2021 and projects will be restarted or be resumed. However, the real uptrend will probably not start until early 2022 and will come closer to normal and pre-crisis levels in 2023.
