During the 5 days at the world's largest industrial trade fair I spoke to over 200 people from different manufacturing companies. We mainly discussed engineering trends in today's global era, about the most critical topics in product development cycle of these companies and whether GrabCAD and our 2500+ engineers could bring value into their processes.
Most of the managers I met admitted that there is a definite lack of high quality engineers on the market and that if additional manpower were available they'd immediately use it to outrun the competition. Many were positively surprised about the ease of ordering services like photorealistic images to improve marketing materials of their products and increase sales as a result. Having high quality product images on their website or booklets makes significant difference to the value proposition and helps the clients to visualise the product.
I used the time available to make a number of video interviews with the key persons from Siemens and Volkswagen to share some of the opinions, ideas and solutions from the big players of the fair. Interviews with Volkswagen and Siemens PLM are already up, Solidworks will join them soon.
Is there any value in participating in a large industry fair like Hannover Messe? In my opinion, yes. It’s the most important event of the industry sector in Europe and a perfect opportunity to benchmark your competition, get an overwhelming amount of face-to-face feedback from the customers but also to talk to the companies in your sector. Interesting things, follow-up meetings, connections, partnerships start to happen when you talk to people.
Of course, it is essential to make proper preparations. The exhibitors who had the most visitors didn’t just present their products but offered something - an e-bike manufacturers demonstrating their technical expertise or showing animated "how it is made" animations on large touch screens. After all, it is a networking event and not just a dry exhibition.
Visiting Hannover Messe was an exciting experience and exactly what I love the most about my job - talking to customers and getting feedback on how we can bring them better value. These conversations with hundreds of executives confirmed that GrabCAD is on the right track and only the sky is the limit.
I encourage you to get in touch if you'd like to ask questions about our services, comment or need a quotation for your engineering tasks. You can reach me at lauri@grabcad.com or on my cell phone at +442032878558
