Norcan Excellence in alsace

Excellence in
Claude Keiflin
Dominique Mercier
Ignacio Haaser
Companies’ Expertise
Éditions du Signe
Norcan
Entreprise
The industrial mecano
Sous titre
From a clever assembly system of aluminium profiles and accessories,
Norcan offers customised modular solutions such as structures, workstations,carts, means of access
and conveyors. By combining these solutions, it is able to offer complete specialised installations.
Founded in 1987 in Haguenau by Paul Hannes, former manager of INA Roulements-Schaeffler,
the company was taken over in 2014 by Stéphane Fauth, a native of Alsace, who is passionate
about the world of industry and who aims to grow the business.
Chapeau
Paul Hannes, a native of Mulhouse, was 63 years old
when he founded Norcan with his daughter MarieJosé Lambla and his son Jean-Victor. Interned in the
Schirmeck concentration camp during WWII for acts of
resistance, engaged in the First French Army after many
adventures in Germany, he joined Manurhin in Mulhouse
where he was for ten years a highly effective business
manager. He was noticed by the brothers Wilhelm
and George Schaeffler, owners of the INA Roulements
Group (bearings manufacturers), headquartered in
Herzogenaurach, Bavaria (Germany). In 1962, they
offered him the job of general manager at their plant in
Haguenau (today known as Schaeffler France), which
then had 100 employees. When he retired in 1984,
there were more than 1,400 people. Marked by his war
years, Paul Hannes is driven by a “regional patriotism”
which led him to say in 1997: “The best way to enrich a
region is to found businesses and make them successful
by creating the greatest possible number of jobs.”
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> Checking parts for the catalogue
This is a piece of advice that he would not fail to put into
practice by creating, in addition to his responsibilities
in the Schaeffler Group, SM Noral (North Alsace
Mechanical Company) specialising in linear guidance.
He sold it in 1987 to INA Roulements in order to set up
Norcan. “I felt that aluminium profiles lacked a simple
and clever fastening system”, he said. With the engineer,
Matthias Keller, whom he recruited onto his team, he
developed profile assembly around the standard M8
fastenings without welding. In the grooves of the profiles
a variety of accessories can be attached. “At first, we cut
and machine finished aluminium profiles by the metre,
but we soon realised that to stand out from our competitors
we had to design turnkey solutions”, says Marie-José
Lambla, daughter of Paul Hannes and co-founder of
Norcan of which she became CEO, while her brother
Jean-Victor, general manger, was in charge of logistics and
trading. “We are fortunate that our parents got us started.
We were all proud, in the family, of having been asked
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Excellence
in
Alsace
“I noticed there was a good harmony
between him and the Norcan executives.”
> Panel machining post; Bruno, team leader
> A range of 80 profiles belonging to Norcan
to enter the Stock Exchange on the secondary market.
The adventure lasted four years, after which we bought
back our shares”, said Marie-José Lambla.
the Crespin site, near Valenciennes. Recruited by Alstom
Transport in 2005, for 5 years he managed the Salzgitter
site in Germany. While representing Alstom in London
for its tram and metro activity in London and Dublin, he
had the overwhelming urge to set up on his own and the
desire to buy out Norcan. It was 2011. He contacted the
Hannes family. “I want to buy your company.” “It’s not for
sale”, replied Paul Hannes who was then 87 years old.
80 models of profiles
and 400 accessories
“We started with two types of profiles and a dozen
accessories. In 2014, when we sold the company, the
catalogue contained about 80 different profiles and over
400 accessories”, adds Jean-Victor Hannes. The Hannes
family took some time to resolve the question of handing
on the family business to a “stranger” since neither JeanVictor nor Marie-José had children. Yet a serious buyer
had for some time been knocking at the door. For three
years in fact, Stéphane Fauth, who had set his sights on
this business alone and had been besieging the owners.
Passionate about the world of industry, endowed with
managerial experience in several large groups, he
dreamed of nothing but Norcan from the moment that
Régis Bello, former CEO of the De Dietrich Group and
now president of the Strasbourg University Foundation,
had drawn his attention to the small-medium-sized
business in Haguenau.
The perseverance of a buyer
who is passionate about industry
Stéphane Fauth was not put off by this rebuff. He worked
on several takeover bids. In August 2012, on the death
of Paul Hannes, the transaction appeared on track to be
concluded. He already had one foot in the company
where he spent three months after his resignation from
Alstom. But Marie-José Lambla could not bring herself to
retire and she offered him the post of general manager.
“I noticed there was a good harmony between him and
the Norcan executives.” General management is not
what Stéphane Fauth was looking for; he preferred to go
off once again and take orders from the naval dockyards
of the submarine division of DCNS in Cherbourg.
He wouldn’t return unless he was in charge, something
which Paul Hannes’ children eventually agreed to. The
sale was signed on July 31st 2014. Reunited around
the table were three shareholders who each held one
third of the capital: Siparex Investment Fund that supports
SMEs in the long term, Alsace Capital Fund with strong
regional roots, and Stéphane Fauth who managed to
bring together the four main directors of Norcan, JeanMaurice Baer for sales, Damien Winling for the technical,
Vincent Billerey for operations and Carinne Kratz,
A graduate engineer from ENSAM (Mechanical
Engineering) and ENSAé (National School of Technical
Aeronautics) Stéphane Fauth began his career in the
design office of aerospace propulsion at Aérospatiale
and Matra, before joining the De Dietrich Group in 1990.
He was notably director of operations at the Reichshoffen
site, and after its acquisition by Alstom, he was industrial
manager at Cogifer, remaining in the lap of De Dietrich.
In 2002, he joined Bombardier as general manager of
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> Computer-aided design; Julien, business manager
> Cutting post; Joel, in charge of the multi-function
machining workshop
>D
rilling post; Jean-Georges,
production operator
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Excellence
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“We adapt quickly to customer needs.
We’re able to produce a prototype of a cart in record time.”
for administration and finance. Stéphane Fauth himself
held 17% of the capital.
specifications”, says Stéphane Fauth. NORCAN employs
about ten technical sales engineers who are deployed
regionally across France, all former members of the
design office. Fed by the experience of thousands of
achievements, they are able to imagine solutions on site
with the customer and translate them immediately into a
workable blueprint with a quote. “We adapt quickly to
customer needs. We’re able to produce a prototype of a
cart in record time as well as more elaborate installations
that incorporate workstations within a line of automated
conveyors for example.” The modular aspect of the
products also allows the company to remain adaptable
to any future changes, something which is a necessity in
today’s world.
Norcan in reality sells solutions in industrial mechanics,
a “Baukastensystem”. It was the Norcan engineers
who designed the extrusion dies made available to the
aluminium suppliers who manufacture the profiles. From
these profiles, optionally combined with steel tubes
and a variety of accessories, assembled with standard
M8 fixings, the company offers multiple solutions for its
customers’ industrial plants. It addresses all segments of
industry, logistics and distribution as well as e-commerce
operators.
The customer has an efficiency problem,
Norcan thinks up the solution
A new international ambition
“Our design team, comprising some 15 people, focuses
on the development of application solutions. Every
week we prepare tens of orders which are all ’tailor
made’, something that makes us think up thousands of
applications a year, and we deliver them finished and
mounted. We are real providers of solutions to improve
the efficiency of our clients’ industrial facilities", says
Stéphane Fauth. That’s how Norcan produced the carts
that allow Amazon employees, the great specialists in
e-commerce, to bring together different elements of an
order and have them converge on workstations, where
products are dispatched, until final packaging.
Stéphane Fauth is considering an industrial location in
Germany where the SME already has a commercial
company (GMBH). Norcan has a small factory in
Barcelona and also works with six partners in exports:
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, England
and Tunisia. They buy aluminium profiles and accessories
and develop their own solutions by applying Norcan’s
rules. Exports is one of the areas that the new CEO
is hoping to revisit, as part of his action plan for the
development of the company. “It’s in exports that we’ll
achieve the most growth. We will focus on external
growth, on the model of our Spanish set-up”, he says.
“We listen very closely to our customers but we prefer
to imagine the solutions ourselves to a problem that
they submit to us, rather than responding to voluminous
Relying on his teams and a workforce of quality with
highly technical skills, steeped in the work culture of the
Rhineland model, Stéphane Fauth wants to step up to
> Légende à venir
> The profile-machining post
a new level with a company which he selected and
which perfectly matches the heady idea that he has of an
industry characterised by great creativity and constantly
renewed inventiveness. His ambition is to make his small-
> Cutting section
> The design office team of 15 technicians and engineers
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> Profile-cutting post;
Maurice, production operator
> Assembling a complete installation
to-medium size company into an international midsize
firm, trained to become “the” European benchmark in
industrial mechanics.
Staff : 100 people including 15 technicians and engineers in the design office,
10 technical sales engineers in the French regions
and a dozen employees
in a small
factory in Barcelona, Spain.
L'Alsace
en chiffres
Turnover : 17 million euros
Effectifs :30%
mmmmmm
Exports :
of sales
Chiffre d'affaires : mmmmmm
Export : mmmmmmm
> The stock of profiles of about 150 tonnes,
for more than 600 tonnes of annual consumption
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