“The past year started very positively for the Ima Schelling Group, by March 2020 everything was on track for us. The order intake was even better than expected, we had rather expected a consolidation of the industry in 2020 due to the strong previous years.” With these words, Wolfgang Rohner, Chief Executive Officer of Ima Schelling Group opened this year’s press conference of the successful machine manufacturer. “And then came Corona and the first lockdown, the retreat to the home office. The uncertainty on the part of the customers was noticeable to us in the falling order intake. And the general uncertainty then accompanied us for several months. Until the ‘turnaround’, because our customers in the furniture industry were increasingly busy again, end consumers began to invest their money in their own walls and furniture. We benefited from this, and from September onwards we received more orders. Many projects that had already been started were then pursued and the year ended with a positive trend in incoming orders,” continues the manager. Nevertheless, Ima Schelling Group (ISG), like many others, lost ground: in the end, there was a drop in sales of around 15 percent, but according to Rohner, a positive end result despite everything. In 2019, ISG generated 299 million euros, corresponding to around 252 million euros in 2020.

“We actively used 2020 for restructuring,” Rohner said. “The company is now divided into four business units: The largest unit is the Woodworking BU with everything addressed toward the furniture industry, the Board BU for the panel industry, the Precision BU for composites, plastics, steel and aluminum, and the Consulting BU. For the Board and Precision BUs, we expect significant growth in the coming years due to increasing automation, which is why we are positioning ourselves accordingly. The Consulting BU is aimed at the phase before a customer deals with technical details. Here, too, we want to support them in an advisory capacity, work with them to develop concepts and move the companies forward.”

However, the Ima-Schelling Group is not only growing through better structures, but also through foreign activities. There are now 14 service and sales companies, production sites in Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia. The most recent additions are the subsidiaries in Sweden and Lithuania. “We simply want to be even more direct with the customer,” Rohner explains.

Ultimately, the sales team led by Andreas Bischoff, Chief Sales Officer of the Ima Schelling Group, puts the horsepower on the road. He succeeds in this primarily through the regular innovations from Lübbecke and Schwarzach. “We definitely did not go into shock in 2020, but remained active and agile,” affirms Bischoff. “Of course, this also included getting ‘normal’ operations up and running again in the first place after the initial lockdown, because various delivery dates had been postponed, and we had to cope with travel restrictions and the like. From the summer on, it was no longer a crisis for us in the group, but we were able to plan more concretely again. And above all, we were able to put energy into development again. Fortunately, we didn’t have any supplier problems, so we worked constantly through the crisis, and short-time work was only used temporarily for the sales team. In addition to new products, last year we also set up the first digital ‘Service Days’ in November, effectively the first run-through for the more extensive ‘NeighbourWood’ event, which runs until Friday, May 7.”

Ima Schelling has sharpened the profile of the internal “Academy,” created the basis for further growth here as well. The “Academy” is aimed primarily at the preservation and bundling of knowledge for the training and development of employees and, of course, customers.

Investments did not stop at the Group either: there was a new ERP system, a central warehouse in Lübbecke, IT and digitalization tools, and new processing machines in production.

Maximilian Lehner, Sales Director & Managing Partner of Ima Schelling Group, is very satisfied with the “NeighbourWood” event so far, already on the first day the organizer counted more than 200 people at the first sessions. There were about 1,200 registrations in advance, about 50 percent of them from abroad. The online event is divided into “Wood’s new?” with live presentations of the new products; the virtual tour of the production halls “Up close and personal”; “News from the neighborhood”, where users can virtually visit Egger Holzwerkstoffe’s furniture front production; “Wood’s up? The expert round” with panel discussions and, of course, personal conversations via video call.

Christoph Geiger, Chief Operating Officer at Ima Schelling, drew attention to the innovations. First and foremost, “Aimi by Ima Schelling”, a new type of cross-group software landscape. The whole thing is a software solution for controlling machines as well as plants and is intended to channel digital communication between man and machine. Artificial intelligence plays a major role here, which is also implied by the name of the new Ima Schelling family member. “ai” stands for artificial intelligence, “mi” for machine intelligence. The goal is simple integration of machines and systems into the customer’s individual environment and uniform, intuitive operation.

In addition to this major software innovation, there is also a lot to discover in the hardware area at Ima Schelling. For example, the “Imagic L1” throughfeed drilling machine for batch size 1, the flexible “hl 1” high-performance cutting system for individual panels, or a new type of fully automatic edge handling system for the edge material rolls.