History of the Kessler engine plant
The mechanical engineer Franz Kessler founded a company in Chemnitz in 1923 that dealt with the then emerging electric drive technology. In the beginning, the young company produced DC motors for machine tools and textile machines. In the machine tool industry , Kessler was able to develop a good reputation by equipping grinding machines with DC motors and the associated converters, thus gaining customers nationwide. In addition to Reinicker AG, based in Chemnitz at the time, the largest European machine tool manufacturer with over 3,000 employees at the time, the grinding machine manufacturer Fortuna from Stuttgart was also one of the first customers.
From the beginning to the end of the Second World War
Since it was founded, the company has developed and produced DC motors and associated converters for grinding machines. The company, which was founded in the inflation year 1923 and survived the turmoil of the global economic crisis , was able to show a product range with which it was able to assert itself in the market at the end of the 1930s. It then took part in the deceptive upswing of the Third Reich as well as in the devastating consequences of the Second World War. During the Allied air raids on Chemnitz in 1944, the company buildings were so badly damaged that the company had to be relocated to Grüna near Chemnitz.
New beginning in Upper Swabia
In order to escape restrictions imposed by the new rulers of the Soviet occupation zone , Franz Kessler probably made the decision to go to the West around 1947. His daughter Elfriede, who married Kurt Petschel, an employee of Kessler, shortly before the planned move, stayed with him in Grüna and continued the company there on a modest basis. The rest of the family followed Franz Kessler to Metzingen , where the family of his other son-in-law lived. From there he was placed in Buchau , where he founded another company on January 2, 1950 at the suggestion of the Stuttgart grinding machine manufacturer at the age of 60.
The founding team, initially five people, was soon reinforced by the trained electrical machine builder Wolfgang Hößler from the remaining Kessler company in Grüna. Despite the lack of skilled workers in the predominantly agricultural region, Kessler stayed in Buchau.
The first plant in Buchau
With a purchase agreement of October 7, 1955, Kessler finally acquired a site in Schussenrieder Strasse 75 with a workshop, residential building and courtyard, thus finally laying the foundations for the Kessler engine plant in Buchau, which has now grown to 10 employees. In the following years, more engineers and workers from the region were recruited and the customer base from the German and Swiss machine tool industries was increased. Kessler no longer limited itself to grinding drives, but also produced drives for boring mills , milling machines , lathes and special machines such as hobbing machines. In 1959 the company had a turnover of 1,500,262 DM and employed around 60 people.
Foundation of Franz Kessler KG
The increased importance of the company was entered in the commercial register in 1958, initially as a so-called sole proprietorship, but the conversion into a limited partnership was already planned. On January 1, 1959, Franz Kessler KG was founded with Franz Kessler as general partner. Limited partners were his wife Emmy and his two daughters Anna Marie Mühlhäusler and Elfriede Petschel. On January 1, 1960, his daughter Elfriede Petschel became a general partner , Franz Kessler remained in the company as a limited partner at the age of 71.
The development of the company was thus brought to a certain conclusion with a company form appropriate to the importance of the company. However, the acquired site was already too small again, which is why Franz Kessler began to acquire additional properties in the immediate vicinity in the 1960s in order to build a factory site that is still recognizable today. With the expansion of its product range to include boring and milling machines, the performance classes of the motors and converters produced rose from what used to be max. 10 kW to the order of 150 kW. The larger components ultimately required larger processing machines and a significantly larger test field .
While the Leonardsatz, which had long been known in principle, consisted of several motors and generators mounted separately on a base plate , Kessler built all the necessary units on a single shaft and accommodated them in a housing of the Kessler 1-armature converter - in the one for Vertical construction, which is very well known to him, is an extremely space-saving and compact machine component. This gave Kessler certain unique selling points, which laid the foundation for growth in the 1960s and which thus became a very important decade in the company's history. The company's turnover in 1969 reached DM 6,543,227 and the workforce had grown to around 90 employees.
An era comes to an end
The company founder died on January 9, 1971 at the age of 82. The management was now the responsibility of his daughter Elfriede Petschel, who had been a general partner of Franz Kessler KG since 1960. Because of different views on the future of the company, daughter Anna Marie left the limited partnership at the end of 1972. When Emmy Kessler died on August 1, 1974, at least one or more limited partners were necessary to continue the KG. Ms. Petschel decided to bring the employees of the early years into the company.
All in all, however, this constellation did not last long either, because daughter Elfriede Petschel fell seriously ill in 1976 and died on March 10, 1978 after numerous hospital stays of cancer. During the years of the illness, she was concerned with a viable future for the company. They decreed in his will establishing the Franz Kessler charitable foundation company , which she bequeathed her entire estate and installed as the main shareholder of the company. It specified the charitable purpose with the aim of protecting, educating and supporting mentally and physically disabled children and young people in Germany. For the time after her death she appointed Karl Reisch to the board of the Franz Kessler Gemeinnützige Stiftungsgesellschaft and at the same time entrusted him with the management of the company Franz Kessler KG.
Technological change in the 1970s
In the 1970s, the company suffered from the severe economic crisis at the beginning of the decade. In addition, there was a radical technological change: the replacement of the rotating converters with the converters that are now ready for the market. For Kessler with serious consequences, because around 60% of sales were generated with converters, a product branch that should now be discontinued. Although Kessler had started developing a series of converters in the early 1970s, it quickly became apparent that it would by no means be enough for an economical and thus competitive production. Even if all supplied Kessler motors could have been equipped with their own converters, one would be the big houses like z. B. Siemens , BBC or AEG remained constantly inferior, because these companies had, in addition to the machine tool industry, many other industries in which they could sell these modern devices and thus an unmatchable advantage in terms of quantities. Kessler therefore deliberately did not enter into the production of power electronic components.
The discontinuation of the converter was inevitable, but the company had years of experience with controllable DC motors for machine tools. The dynamic requirements of these machines grew steadily with the increased development of the NC and later CNC- controlled machining centers . Here Kessler recognized his opportunity with a new series of DC motors that were specially required for the dynamic requirements under power converter supply, to profitably use the know-how acquired over many years.
Under the management of Mr. Reisch, a supply contract was signed with the then BBC, so that Kessler was included in the BBC product range and sizes 90 to 132, which were not manufactured by the group, were obtained from Kessler. The BBC, which at that time was also pushing into the drive business of the machine tool industry, gained access to the industry through Franz Kessler KG, which was introduced there. Kessler, on the other hand, had a partner who was proficient in power electronics and consistently used this collaboration to further develop its DC machine series for power converter supply and to position it more strongly on the market.
Out of the depression caused by the changes in the Kessler family and thus also the limited partnership as well as the technological change in the market, the company had repositioned itself and resumed its position in 1979 with a turnover of 11,207,907 DM and 140 employees.
Entry into CNC technology
The supply contract with the then BBC had a positive effect in the economically still weak years at the beginning of the 1980s, because Kessler was able to achieve attractive quantities through their sales channels. The Kessler motors proved to be quality products and so Kessler opened up the rapidly growing and increasingly important market of CNC machining centers with its motors designed for commutation dynamics through its own sales channels . So was z. For example, the FZ 16 from Chiron in Tuttlingen , which was produced in 1982 and was the fastest machining center in the world at the time , was equipped with the Kessler MIF 90.
The location in the middle of the residential area made further expansion impossible. In 1988, therefore, the entire factory was relocated to the specially newly created Buchau industrial area in the Kappel district, which is now the main factory.
At the same time as the plant was relocated, there was another technological change. Using modern frequency converters , it became possible to operate the asynchronous motor, which is significantly more robust in structure, requires less maintenance and is also cheaper than the DC motor, with a control quality that is adequate for the main machine tool drives. The development of a completely new, air-cooled asynchronous motor series in square design began in the old factory : DMQ. This was followed later by the liquid-cooled DMR series and a DME built-in motor series, which were then developed in Kappel.
The competition in the field of asynchronous motors for main drives was much tougher. Drive package and control manufacturers such as B. Siemens , Bosch , Indramat or the CNC world market leader Fanuc offered main spindle motors in a package. Kessler therefore looked for the fields in which the package manufacturers with their engines designed for larger series had nothing to offer. From then on, the development focused on higher speeds, smoother running and spindle drive options such as cooling lubricant supply . At the same time, the package manufacturers realized that Kessler should not be viewed as an annoying main spindle competitor, but rather as a partner for the main spindle options that they themselves could not offer.
Proven on the world market
In 1989 the company achieved a turnover of 20,446,091 DM with a workforce of 170 employees. During the reunification euphoria , the situation in the machine tool industry initially seemed good. However, the main competitor from Japan relied primarily on easy-to-use, workshop-compatible, programmable machines. As a result, the American job shop market went mainly to the Japanese, while the complex plant business there remained a German domain. Ultimately, however, the high numbers of units brought the price advantage and sparked the necessary pressure on the quality discipline. In addition, the competitors from the Far East had a state-sponsored interest and investment policy at the time . As a result, the entire German mechanical engineering sector, but especially machine tool construction, went through a severe structural crisis in the early 1990s . The company was also affected by the crisis. At the lowest point in 1993, sales fell to DM 9,296,020 and for the first time in the company's history, employees had to be cut.
At that time, Kessler had had a close business relationship with Deckel AG for many years , which, like Chiron, was one of the main customers. At the end of the 1980s, Kessler became a real development partner of Deckel AG for high-speed drives, alongside a motor supplier. At that time, for the first time, the Deckel horizontal centers aimed for speeds in the range of 15,000 to 20,000 revolutions / minute, and the first operable motors for such centers were developed and built in the company. When the signs of the crisis appeared at the beginning of the 1990s, the universal machine builders for tool and mold making reacted with completely new machine concepts. Lid with the V-series and a little later Hermle with the C-series brought completely new vertical center generations onto the market, for which Kessler designed a generation of spindles with speeds of 8,000 and 15,000 revolutions / minute at torques of up to 130 Nm. At that time there were already manufacturers of motor spindles with much higher speeds, but there was no spindle on the market that could offer reasonable torques for the universal hogger in the lower speed range. With the Swabian machine tools, the Kessler motor spindles received their reference in the production machine sector , which was another step towards the breakthrough. Together with its customers, the company managed to get through the hard crisis of the first half of the 1990s.
Ascent with the motor spindle
With the award of the Dr. Rudolf Eberle Innovation Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg in 1994, Franz Kessler's product developments received public recognition for the first time, which after a phase characterized by concerns about the future, short-time work, job cuts on the one hand and the most intensive development work on the other hand, had a motivating effect on the workforce.
On April 1, 1995, Rudolf Reisch, Karl Reisch's son, joined the company as commercial director. Eckhard Herwanger, who has worked as a calculation and development engineer since 1988 , was given technical management. The company's business activity picked up thanks to the success of the main customers, who were able to demonstrate their competitiveness with their modern machine concepts. In addition, Kessler determined to acquire a larger customer base. On January 1, 1997, Mr. Rudolf Reisch and Mr. Eckhard Herwanger were appointed managing directors of the company in addition to Karl Reisch. However, the young management team only stayed a short while on the common path: Rudolf Reisch died on July 8, 1999 as a result of a car accident. Coming out of the crisis, the most economically successful decade of the company, which has meanwhile grown to 260 employees, with an annual turnover of 41,870,935 DM in 1999, remains overshadowed by the severe human loss.
The new millennium
The beginning of the 2000s was positive for the industry and the company. Kessler was able to win many new customers and, as a partner of the modern machine tool industry, had established a recognized market position in its segment. On January 1, 2003, Uwe Rondé, who has been technical director since September 1, 1999, was appointed to the management of Franz Kessler GmbH, which was founded on January 1, 2001, to support Eckhard Herwanger.
In 2001 and 2002, KESSLER was named Supplier of the Year by Gildemeister AG . In 2002, KESSLER was again awarded the Innovation Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg for the development of a motor spindle in synchronous technology, which set new records in terms of its acceleration and the combined machining values. Building on these successes, sales increased annually, the main factory in Bad Buchau was expanded several times and the workforce continuously increased.
Until the beginning of the global economic crisis at the end of 2008, the company with its 550 employees generated an annual turnover of around 120 million euros, 104 million euros of which at the Bad Buchau location. The year 2011 is overshadowed by the death of Eckhard Herwanger, who dies after a serious illness.
Since 2013 KESSLER has been represented internationally with technology and service locations in the USA, Taiwan, China and Russia. As managing directors of the KESSLER Group with around 800 employees, Dr. Börne Rensing and Dr. Manuel Gerst ordered. In 2017, the turnover of Europe's largest motor spindle manufacturer increased to 130 million euros.