Festo Limited (Northampton)

Company Profile

Festo is a truly global organisation and the largest and leading business of its kind in Europe with an annual turnover more than €3.5 billion. At its roots, Festo remains a family-owned company, financially independent and socially committed. The company evolved from a woodworking background that started innovating with, at the time, ground-breaking pneumatic automation.

Today the company is a driving force in industrial automation and technical education. The company offers more than 30,000 standard electric and pneumatic products that are available in millions of variants and yet have a system solution back bone ensuring easy connectivity. These include pneumatic and electric drives, servo controllers, motion control, modular valve terminals, handling and assembly technology and all the supporting components and equipment to serve the numerous standard and specialist requirements of the industrial and process automation sectors.
Important sectors include Food and Beverage, Packaging, Electronics, Semi-Conductor, Automotive, Assembly, Bio-Tech and Pharma. Increasingly the LifeTech sector is growing in importance – in Laboratory Automation and Medical Technology. Festo has a world-wide reputation for technical excellence. This is driven by a commitment to investment more than 7% of annual turnover in R&D to reflect the ever-changing needs of customers.

Festo was a founding member of the Industry 4.0 initiative and plays an active role in developing the technology for smart, connected products. Festo is using structured digital data to support the whole machine life cycle from design to operation and re-purposing. Digital Twins are already available for many products and are being rolled out across the range. These are an important part in the digitalisation jigsaw spanning from the smart devices to edge and cloud-based data collection and interpretation. Since 2018 machine learning and artificial intelligence have been used for predictive maintenance, energy efficiency and quality optimisation, today this is all under the banner of the Festo AX (Festo Automation Experience) software solution.

Active in the UK since 1968 the company has more 100 employees in GB supported by their North-West Europe country cluster structure and a large Official Partner distribution network. To support its systems solution approach the company invests strongly in its Application and Engineering teams working alongside its sales teams to supply both component based and complete engineered solutions.

With its Blue World approach Festo is looking at how, through automation and technical education, it can help address the big global challenges of safe supply and support for demographic changes whilst rapidly converting to CO2 neutral production and minimised use of resources.