Phoenix Contact opens Customer and Technology Center in Michigan

Phoenix Contact today celebrated the grand opening of its new Customer and Technology Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Top company officials from the U.S. and Germany welcomed customers, industry representatives and local and trade press for presentations and a dinner at the Customer and Technology Center, located at 500 Avis Drive, Ann Arbor, to mark the grand opening. Attendees also got an advance look at a few new products developed at the Ann Arbor location.

Approximately 40 employees work in the 27,000-square-foot building. Phoenix Contact purchased the property in 2010 and has completed extensive renovations to make the center into a modern training, demonstration and software development facility. The centerpiece of the facility is a demonstration room highlighting the ways Phoenix Contact products can meet customer needs in five specific industries:
•    Automotive
•    Power generation
•    Oil and gas
•    Transportation
•    Water/wastewater

“Our investment in this Customer and Technology Center in Ann Arbor is a clear commitment towards the American market and our future strategies,” said Roland Bent, senior vice president for marketing and development, Phoenix Contact GmbH & Co. KG. “We increasingly focus on a high local technological competence and the ability to offer our customers comprehensive engineering services and solutions for their future tasks, in addition to excellent products.

Bent added, “These ‘solutions for the future,’ as we want to offer them to our customers, increasingly rely on software — which is the central core competence of this new technology location.
“With strategies and investments like those we’ve made in this Customer and Technology Center, we consider ourselves well prepared to continue to grow with the same dynamics as demonstrated in the past decade, which boosted our turnover from 600 million euros to 1.5 billion euros.”

Jack Nehlig, president of Phoenix Contact USA, stated, “"Our new Ann Arbor Customer and Technology Center brings Phoenix Contact closer to our customers in the Midwest.  It creates an open-interaction environment where our customers can come and discuss their needs, and see how Phoenix Contact products and solutions can help them."
 
Volker Bibelhausen, head of the Division Control and Industry Solutions and a member of the executive board, said, “The recent creation of the Control and Industry Solutions group prepares us for future growth. We are especially proud that the Ann Arbor office is part of our division. It is the head office of Phoenix Contact’s newly formed U.S. automotive global industry management team, which is an integral part of our global solutions strategy.  Ann Arbor is also the U.S. home of our Software Competence Center, which created our PC WORX Soft-PLC RT and is an innovation leader for software for our industrial PC and Web technology.”

“These facilities give us a launching pad for the next phase of our software development and industry activities here in Michigan and the U.S.,” said Dave Skelton, vice president and of Phoenix Contact Development and Manufacturing. “The Ann Arbor software personnel, along with the Detroit-based automotive group, were part of the initial organization when we first expanded development activities into the U.S. in 2005.  Combining and keeping these individuals close to our customers has resulted in clear success in the implementation of new technologies and creation of products.  Together with our Harrisburg organization, 11 new global product lines have been launched into the Phoenix Contact Group since this time.”