Pharma Service - Martin Lievenbrueck

At Interpack, many conversations focus on technology. But at GEA, we believe that customer value in the end, can only be created through a long term partnership that goes well beyond delivering a new machine. So what does that long term partnership mean? For me, it all starts with experience and expertise. At GEA, we can look back on more than 100 years of engineering heritage in the pharma industry, with a special spike in continuous tableting and in complex and demanding processes. Now, on the service side, we complement that expertise through a global setup of experts that we have all around the world, which are helping the customers both in solving technical issues and improving the processes for our customers. The second important topic for me is being close to our customers. We combine technology centers, which are in Europe and in Asia with regional hubs and with local teams, service teams that help our customers that have a very strong spike in, again, technical knowledge, technical expertise. And we are also in constant discussions with our customers to understand better and learn from our customers, where we can further grow our capabilities, where we can further localize sourcing to be even faster and still deliver a high quality support for our customers. But expertise and being close to our customers is not sufficient. In the end, it is also very important in a partnership that you are flexible to adapt to the needs of your customers, and we mainly do that by sitting together with our customers, discussing and learning from them. What are really the matrices that matter most to them? Is it cost per tablet? Is it up time? Is it in the end loss of API? And then we can discuss how what can we do? How can we complement as an OEM as a service partner to our customers, to make sure that our customers can excel on what really matters to them? Now, looking forward into the future, there's probably one more topic that needs to be addressed here, and that is digitalization. We increasingly see that our customers are asking for transparency in their processes, and at GEA, we are building digital solutions that help our customers get, well, the transparency that they need to improve the processes, but also to minimize downtime and to maximize the output from their machine. And that is overall what a long term partnership means for me. Having a strong expertise that you can build on, being close to your customers and being flexible enough to combine your technology, your capabilities with the capabilities of the customer so that in the end, the customers can achieve what is what really matters to them.