Revista Paint & Pintura - Edição 234

German-based represented company Worlée, and grinding meads from Silibeads, also based in Germany, as well as quality control equipment manufactured by Adexim-Comexim itself. Wrapping up the forum, Sergio Jose Gomes Filho, partner at Praxis Consulting, as well as a professor for top executives in leadership programs, delivered the lecture titled “The Importance of Innovation in Business.” CELEBRATION - TWENTY-FIVE YEARS TOWARD THE FUTURE Paint manufacturer Tintas Farben celebrates its 25-year anniversary in July. The company sells decorative, industrial, furniture and automotive refinish coatings, the latter two being the business segments that account for most of its sales. Farben currently has facilities in the great states of Santa Catarina, São Paulo, and Paraná. Technical sales manager Ilmar Broch tells us that Farben has not lived to be this age by accident, but rather based on planning. Since its founding, the company has had well-defined growth strategies in place, and that does not seem to be about the change in the years to come. “By 2022, we plan to consolidate our second position on the Top of Mind list for furniture coatings, to further develop our range of industrial coatings, to have a better balance among the three of our main markets served in terms of turnover, to expand our automotive coatings range by 90 percent, and to be among the best companies to work for in Brazil. Our strategic planning for the 2018-2022 period sets equilibrium among those three markets as a goal.” Achieving these results within the specified timeframe will take massive investments, around R$ 25 million, which would go into setting up a thinner plant, reworking the foundation of the factory at the headquarters, expanding resin production capacity, workplace adjustment and improvement actions, and improving logistical efficiency. Last year, too, saw Farben make a series of investments, including a new logistics area implemented at the company’s headquarters, which has doubled its storage capacity. “The change has already yielded a 30-percent improvement in product sorting times. Our efficiency will improve even further, as this space continues re- ceiving funds, which are currently going into the implementation ofWMS standards and a warehouse storage and smart shipping system,” Broch says. Another piece of news has todowith the newthinner plant Brochmentioned above, which is going to be fully automated, something that, according to him, makes for more safety and improved productivity. “The tank loading job, for example, is going to be carried out by the automation system, thereby preventing operational errors. The building has been completed, and the plant should be up and running by the end of 2018. Farben currently produces 18 million liters of thinner each year, and the new plant is going to increase that capacity by 50 percent,” Broch concludes. SUSTAINABILITY - EXPANCEL MICROSPHERES IMPART MAJOR BENEFITS TO COATINGS In the year 1995, AkzoNobel ushered into Brazil one of its major innovations in specialty chemicals: the Expancel microsphere that are used in several market segments, such as paints and coatings, shoe soles, wine bottle corks, tennis balls, explosives, textiles, automotive, and construction plastics, among others, featuring key properties that are unique to each application. The Expancel technology was developed and to this day is only produced in Swe- den. In 2015, however, it began to be extended to the Brazilian market, with the start-up of a plant dedicated to the business, located in Jundiaí, São Paulo. “Since 1995 our product was sold by a distributor based in São Paulo, which is our sales