Никелевые сплавы, Никель, Титан, Трубы из легированной стали

The Zapp Group is now broken down into separate business divisions - Precision Strip, Precision Wire and Materials Engineering. The Precision Strip Division is responsible for the cold forming of precision strip; the Precision Wire Division undertakes the cold forming of products in the form of wire, bars, profiles and high-tech materials for medical technology; the Materials Engineering Division offers specialized advisory services and supplies high performance materials.

 

The divisions are subdivided into independent product departments and a Service Center. These have the overall technical and administrative responsibility for their respective groups of customers and products. In each case, the process-oriented advisory and conversion capabilities are coordinated and organized as a unit. The central concept sees industry as a service provider and the application and pre-production as an integrated process. Whenever you are considering an application which calls for a tailor-made material, the product departments are the right contacts. In them, our customers benefit from the concentrated, specialized knowledge and capabilities of our engineers from the advisory services and our specialists from production, job scheduling, manufacturing research and materials engineering. The integrated departmental work is largely free of any segregation and functions with the utmost flexibility. As a result, we are able not only to react rapidly to your wishes and inquiries, but also to speed up the processing of customers' orders, thereby creating all the advantages required for on-time shipments. In certain cases, the response can be even faster, since the materials most commonly in demand can be supplied at short notice from our store by way of our Service Center.

 

The product departments and our Service Center can now concentrate entirely on you and your requirements by being supported and relieved of some of their responsibilities by inter-company service departments, e.g. logistics, information technology, research & development and quality management. The precise, reliable functioning of the organization as a whole, however, is not an end in itself. The decisive advantage for you is individual problem solving in the wide-ranging field of highly innovative possibilities. The result is that you receive precisely the single, tailor-made, high performance material you actually need. Not only from the technical standpoint but also in economic terms. The special employee profile means troublefree collaboration, both internally and with you.

History

The advances in the steel industry in the last 300 years have influenced life, commerce and culture more than ever before. The Zapp family has been rooted in these developments since 1701. Its particular interest always lay in innovations. As Engelberth Zapp Senior wrote in 1730, "Preserving tradition while pursuing the new". This attitude towards new developments has evolved into a fundamental element of the Corporation's philosophy.

 

It was with the intention of smelting iron ore with charcoal and using water power to drive a forging hammer that Hermann Zapp came to Ründeroth, a small town in the Leppe valley. For five generations, from 1701 to 1869, the family produced steel here, initially as a skilled trade in a forge. Even Krupp bought his refined steel from Zapp. Subsequently production was industrialized with the use of a puddling furnace, a highly advanced development at the time. Krupp visited Zapp again, this time to study puddling. The first major economic crisis in Germany, in 1857, compounded by a financial problem, led to the sale of the business. But the family remained true to steel.

In 1871, Robert Zapp left Ründeroth and established a steel trading company in Düsseldorf, concentrating on specialty steels from the outset. The best of these came from the country that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution - Great Britain. There, Robert Zapp studied the Bessemer process from which, in turn, he determined his course for the future. Drawing on his extensive knowledge, he sold the new steels throughout Europe. Then, in 1887, Alfred Krupp entrusted Robert Zapp's Europe-wide organization with the exclusive distribution rights to his new tool steels (the Krupps only regarded themselves as developers and manufacturers). The new types of steel, however, needed explaining. The competitive advantages they offered called for close relationships with toolmakers, the principal task being to develop new applications. It was for this reason that Alfred Krupp and his successors saw their most suitable sales associate in Robert Zapp. In the course of time, the product range expanded constantly. Zapp's sales organization introduced Krupp's new Nirosta stainless steel in 1913, followed by the new Widia sintered carbide in 1927. About this time, however, another event took place of equal importance when, in 1926, the Robert Zapp Company took over the Ergste steelworks, which had pioneered the cold shaping of stainless steel in the form of wire.

For seventy years, the two companies carried on their own businesses largely independently of each other. In the post-war period, the Robert Zapp Trading Company concentrated on the new types of high performance materials and built up its own extensive network of branches. These ensured success by their proximity to customers. The company introduced new high-tech nickel and cobalt-based materials, while titanium and its derivatives opened up its association with the aerospace industry. Following a comprehensive reorganization, the company now trades under the name of Robert Zapp Werkstofftechnik (Materials Engineering), obtaining the sales rights to high performance powder metallurgic CPM^® materials, subsequently augmented by the ASP^® 2000 series. During this period, the Ergste steelworks, by contrast, increasingly concentrated its production operation on high-alloyed and new specialty steels, continuously reinforcing its position as a supplier to drawing plants and cold rolling mills. The strategic decision in favor of realignment took place in the 1960s with the abandonment of the traditional types of steel to permit the utmost concentration on the innovative field of rustproof and acid and heat resistant steels. Yet, here again, it was necessary to explain the competitive advantages these offered to individual customers, a process only achieved by close collaboration between customer consultants and the engineering staff. The necessity arose because demands and specialized knowledge had expanded considerably in the meantime. It was for this reason that the company's advisory services were organized on a central basis, in Ergste. In 1991, Ergste bought the Westig steel works in Unna, partly to expand the range of products and partly because it enabled the process of internationalization to be strengthened through Westig. In 1995, the two companies amalgamated to form the Ergste Westig steelworks as a member of the Zapp Group. This notwithstanding, Robert Zapp Werkstofftechnik and the Ergste Westig steelworks continued to go their separate ways, both strategically and operationally.

»To pursue the new«, as Engelberth Zapp Senior had written. And much was new. The world had changed. The wall between East and West had fallen and a new Europe arose. At the same time, information technology and the cross-border distribution of labor grew apace. Large customers, in particular, increasingly expanded, or merged, or transferred parts of their business to other countries both within Europe and beyond. For the companies in the Zapp Group, this meant that only long-term internationalization would succeed in ensuring its continuous growth as an independent organization. In the following eventful years, production facilities were set up in Summerville and Dartmouth, in the USA, the second most important market after Europe. The Group companies were also amalgamated into a family controlled joint stock corporation. The decisive factor for its operational activities, however, lay in restructuring the organization to accommodate a new, fast-moving world.