With the appointment of Dr Mats Gökstorp as president of the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), the organisation will be under new leadership for the next three years. Gökstorp, part of the management board of Sick, takes over as president in a difficult time for the vision industry. Speaking to Imaging and Machine Vision Europe, he cited industry marketing activities, through the EMVA website, press releases, newsletter activities, etc, as one of the key focus areas for the EMVA to bring the industry through the economic crisis.
Gökstorp commented: 'It's important to inform the industry's customer base – the industrial and non-industrial segments – about the capabilities of machine vision technologies and what it can provide to support productivity and lower costs. The EMVA has the means to do this by being present at trade shows and through the tools it has within the association, such as the website and the newsletter.'
One of the challenges of promoting the vision industry is that it is such a small community, Gökstorp stated. The vision industry is a niche industry and one of the targets for the EMVA marketing activities is to broaden the contact network and support its members in meeting user industries. With this in mind, the EMVA aims to promote machine vision technologies through cooperation with other industry associations that are part of the customer base. 'We want to build up relationships with these associations thereby making the vision industry more widely known among the user industries,' he said.
Standardisation is also one of the EMVA's focus areas, as it will help the vision industry overcome its stamp of specialisation in technology and ensure customers feel secure when implementing vision equipment. The EMVA handles both 1288 and GenICam standards and in terms of market research and standardisation, it's seeking closer cooperation with its sister associations, the AIA and the JIIA. 'That's an important target for me in my term – to implement closer cooperation with these organisations,' noted Gökstorp.
Finally, Gökstorp aims to maintain the status of the EMVA business conference as one of the main networking events in the industry. The conference has been a great success, exceeding the EMVA executive committee's expectations when it began.
Gökstorp commented: 'I want the EMVA to be an organisation for both large and small companies. In the economic crisis, the small members especially have struggled and I think the activities of the industry marketing and standardisation will benefit these companies through the crisis and beyond it.
'I'm also optimistic,' he continued, 'because the machine vision industry, which is composed of many small companies driven by strong entrepreneurship, has a great capability of survival through hard times. There is such a positive energy within the industry that I believe it has a bright future and will continue to grow because of the entrepreneurial nature of its member companies. The role of EMVA is to provide the networking capability and standardisation to support the entrepreneurship within the industry.'
Gökstorp replaces Gabriele Jansen who served as EMVA president for the preceding two terms and continues as a member of the executive committee. The committee consists of: Mats Gökstorp, president (Sick, Sweden/Germany); Gabriele Jansen (Jansen C.E.O., Germany); Cor Maas (LMI Technologies, The Netherlands); Ignazio Piacentini (ImagingLab, Italy); and Toni Ventura-Traveset (Datapixel, Spain).
