Bc. Jan Lát works in a family company with a First Republic tradition, which focuses on diversification with the aim of not building on just one segment. He was awarded the title of the Manager of the Year 2021 for his ability to manage his company.
You are a traditional Czech engineering company, where managing technological development requires having set managerial priorities. What are the priorities of the Manager of the Year you have become this year?
I do not know if my priorities are the typical view of the Manager of the Year, but I believe it can be said in reverse that my priorities contributed to my becoming the Manager of the Year 2021.
My biggest priority is continuity. I am aware that I am building on my ancestors’ master touch, which enabled my siblings and me to jump into the management of a prospering, traditional engineering company in 2007, and this awareness is binding. At the same time, I see that we have eight successors in the next generation to whom we want to hand over a functioning company with perspective.
If I am to be more specific, then for me, it is a necessary condition to do business honestly and to show that it is possible to develop a successful company in the Czech Republic without any tricks and iniquities.
For the company to function and develop internally, I consider it essential to give colleagues the space to develop themselves. We all have a role to play but giving everyone the space to engage in activities “outside their area” has worked for me time and time again. This is because it showcases talents and ambitions and gives the opportunity to further develop one’s own skills, thereby benefiting the company as a whole.
We see the impact of the energy crisis on industry every day. What challenges do you see for your business?
It sounds like an absolute cliché, but every threat is also an opportunity. On the one hand, the impact of the turbulence in the energy market can be devastating for us – three out of four production plants are very energy intensive, and electricity and natural gas costs are the fourth most other hand, this is why we were among the first to notice changes in energy costs – already in May 2021, the increase in costs was so significant for us that I developed a model for indexing product prices in relation to the energy exchange. We started confronting our customers with this model, and by the end of the year, we had agreements with the most important of them to reflect the additional energy costs in their selling prices. It was not an easy period, but it was absolutely essential for our survival. After initially rejecting our model, some customers eventually asked if they could adopt it and apply it to their other suppliers. This is because they understood that the model was open and fair – once energy prices started to stabilise or fall, the price of our products would fall too.
Of course, rising costs followed by falling demand in virtually all industries has led us to renew our thinking about “energy reuse”. We already use waste heat from manufacturing for water heating, for heating, etc., but extreme energy prices are putting projects on the table that were shelved years ago because of inadequate payback times. With today’s uncertainties, there are opportunities to reduce our dependence on energy and thus reduce future costs. Thus, the constraint in the current situation is more about investment opportunities to encompass both production technologies and energy projects.
Innovation is a prerequisite for competitiveness. Is replacing energy-intensive production with 3D printing the way to develop your company?
Innovation is a driving force not only for competitiveness, but also for the activity of production teams – it motivates everyone to show what they can do and what they are good at. That is why we spend significant amounts on innovation and cooperation with universities and academia every year. Regardless of crises or downturns in the company’s performance – it is a breeding ground for the future.
3D metal printing, which we actively started five years ago, is exactly such a project. We see 3D metal printing as a complement to our conventional technologies. We see it much more as a competitive advantage than as a threat to industries like foundry production.
The production costs of 3D printing in large-scale production have so far multiplied compared to traditional production methods, such as casting, stamping or machining. In our concept, 3D printing is thus being promoted either in piece production (in our case, for example, prototyping) or, and this is much more common in our case, in the production of tool parts for conventional production. 3D printing gives us the possibility to produce internal mould structures with cooling channels or complicated cooling structures, which help to make production more efficient, shorten the production cycle, and thus reduce energy consumption. At the same time, it fundamentally reduces the time from design to serial delivery.
But around 3D printing, you need a broader team of engineers, developers, designers and other smart and skilled people. A company of our size can hardly allocate such a team in its budget alone, and this was the motive for us to participate in the establishment of a company where the development capacity will be divided among several entities. Therefore, the cost impact will be divided. In 2015, together with the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Česká Zbrojovka, we were at the birth of the company CARDAM s.r.o. (Center of Applied Research and Development for Additive Manufacturing Ltd.), which has been growing since its foundation and today provides its services to world-famous companies that are also considered to be at the top in the field of development and 3D printing. (I cannot specify)
At the same time, we were hoping for the science-industry link that we are now putting the emphasis on from CARDAM – and we have confirmed again and again how right this decision was.
In this respect, it is actually about building on tradition and the work of our ancestors, on which we have been building. In the 1950s, our grandfather was one of the designers of the then-revolutionary, low-pressure die-casting technology. Today, this technology is widespread all over the world, and its typical product is all aluminium die-cast wheels on cars. Then in the 1980s, our father managed to bring high-pressure water-jet technology to Czechoslovakia, which had been embargoed in the US until then as part of the space programme. I believe that one day our descendants will be able to list similarly groundbreaking steps from our episode.
Thank you for the interview.
