June 2018

34 35 AFA SYSTEMS LTD. directly to our company, or through agents and distributors around the world that bring us proj- ects to quote on. That’s our primary function. Our sales staff isn’t the traditional sales force that knocks on doors to drum up business.We attend five or six trade shows a year – two in the US. and four international ones. It gives us the opportu- nity to get face time with our customers, as well as with agents and distributors in those regions. We belong to the PMMI (Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute) – an American-based organization that we joined because the U.S. is our biggest market.” Eighty percent of AFA customers are large entities – consumer product manufacturers like Kimberley-Clarke, Clorox, Kellogg’s, General Mills, and other Fortune 1000 companies. The last 20 percent are smaller manufacturers that don’t typ- ically have the technology or funding to support the type of machinery AFA supplies. Paul explains, “We do an engineer-to-order build. The packaging industry itself is very diversified. Even with small- er companies offering similar products, manu- facturing techniques vary, which determines how they want to go to market with the product. That makes their requirements different, even within the same product.” Surprisingly, only three countries in the world provide 90 percent of the packaging automation machines – the U.S., Germany, and Italy. Paul says, “China is coming on, but mostly for commodi- ty-type machines that are very low priced and difficult to integrate from an automation per- spective. Our primary differentiator from those international competitors is that we are more inclined to design, build, and engineer to a specif- ic application. The industry has traditionally been focused on developing a machine that they want to market to every application, and then have the customer do their process to suit that machine. Whereas, we’re more inclined to engineer a solu- tion.” The company is authorized by the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario to offer pro- fessional engineering services, and AFA’s Certified PMMI Training program can be tailored to meet a customer’s specific needs for training machine operators, mechanical technicians, and electrical technicians. “We have a select number of Service Technicians who complete service on our ma- chines in the field,” says Eric. “They go through our Association training course to ensure they use best practices when they’re doing machine train- ing for operators and maintenance technicians at the end user’s plant.” In the next few months, AFA is expanding operations; doubling the size of the facility. Paul expects that new tax changes introduced in the U.S. will benefit many large manufacturers to pur- chase new equipment and he wants to be ready. “We’re already seeing a very big uptick in our inquiry levels and people looking for automation solutions. I think, generally, there’s a big move towards automation in virtually every country. We have significant orders from China, Argentina - places that you think have low labor costs, but these companies are all committed to automation and the benefits it brings to the table.” To improve efficiency, AFA recently updated its ERP system, so all employees on the floor will