rus
Issue #2/2016
A.Kistner
Agilent Technologies: our solutions could be found wherever chemical analysis is present
Agilent Technologies: our solutions could be found wherever chemical analysis is present
Andreas KISTNER, Business Director Spectroscopy for EMEAI region of Agilent Technologies.
Agilent Technologies is a strong player at the global market. For more than a decade, Agilent Technologies keeps leading positions at the market of analytical chemistry equipment, first of all, of liquid and gas chromatography systems, mass spectrometers, and spectrosсopic systems for elemental analysis. A key focus of the entire company is to provide customer laboratories with modern top quality equipment, which would improve the efficiency of laboratory analysis and scientific research. A fingerprint of Agilent Technologies is building of reliable, trustworthy, long-term relationships with any customer. Agilent Technologies delivers instruments and makes service in any place of Russia, in a very short time. Dr. Andreas Kistner told us about the key features of Agilent’s Russian business and about changes in customer needs within the last years, as well as how Agilent responds to them.
Andreas, could you please tell about the areas and strategies of Agilent’s business in Russia?
Agilent’s main ambition is bringing the most hi-tech and robust equipment into the analytical laboratories. This was the starting point of our business, and this is what we are doing over last four decades. We are particularly known in Russia for supplying high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography (GC) systems, mass spectrometers – that’s all what we are calling our "core business". Another key segment of our market is the spectroscopic equipment, first of all, the spectroscopic elemental analyzers. We have made some outstanding technological innovations in this area, which represented a basis for the construction of our new instruments.
Agilent’s world market includes European, African, and Asia-Pacific countries. Since our markets are much different from each other, we use several operating strategies; sometimes we sell and service our equipment directly, but sometimes through the distributor network. In most countries we have organized our direct representative offices and we operate through them. Sometimes we can directly deliver our production from USA to other countries. But in some other countries we make sales and service through our partner organizations and distributors.
Russian market is quite specific, since there are so many different customers having various needs and possibilities. Since that, any unique business model, even the most proper one, would not be effective; several models must be used at the same time. Agilent applies a so-called "blended channel strategy" for Russia, operating both directly and through our partner organizations. Our direct representative company in Moscow is named "Agilent Technologies OOO", and its specialists are distributed throughout Russia, providing quick and convenient customer support in any country region. We have not only local technicians and service engineers in Russian regions, but also sales managers and product specialists. All Agilent specialists working in Russia are regularly invited for our training courses.
In addition to direct business in Russia, Agilent has a network of partner organizations across the country, which act mainly as distributors of our instruments and consumables. Most of our new production is sold in Russia through distributors; we perform direct sales much less often, mostly to large companies which are our customers for a long time. Service and after-sale support is generally provided by specialists of Agilent's direct representative. However, the technical maintenance should be done immediately after the instrument goes wrong. So we could sometimes redirect the service to our partners for shortening the delay.
In order to study and train Agilent specialists including those working in Russia, several years ago we founded a modern educational and training center in Waldbronn, a place in the south-western Germany. We continue to invest into this training facility, as it is quite important to keep our specialists trained in all new trends and technologies. All our specialists are being invited for regular trainings. We provide a number of training programs, which are tailor made for each kind of specialist. The training of technicians and service engineers is a special task. They should disassemble and reassemble the instrument including all modules by their own, and repeat this for many times. Such training could not be performed in a lecture room, it requires special facilities. Our center in Waldbronn is one of four or five places over the world where the technicians could be educated and regularly trained. Besides that, Agilent has other training centers, which are located in Australia, China, and Japan.
How could you effectively perform and expand your business under unstable economic conditions of today’s Russia?
Our tradition is to build very robust structures which can operate under most circumstances. In Russia we have already organized an effective business. We have built a team of partners whom we can fully trust, and our mutually fruitful cooperation is lasting for many years.
Like other global market players, we regularly face economic rises and falls at some particular markets as well as volatility of currencies. Under such circumstances, we continue to focus on doing what we always used to do, providing high quality production to our customers. Everybody who has our equipment would always need consumables and spare parts, even when it is not possible to buy a new instrument. In today’s Russia we put more focus to the markets of service and after-sale support, although we still have new sales. Our operations at the after-sale market help us to establish stronger connections with customers, which is extremely important for a good business during economical instability period. Another factor providing our stability is an extensive portfolio which includes a broad pallet of solutions different in functionality and price. Customers have a big choice and could always find something to be satisfied with.
What are Agilent’s competitive advantages in Russia?
Our main competitive advantage is a broad experience in the instrument development and production, especially in our "core business" segment, i.e., liquid and gas chromatography systems and mass spectrometers. All our specialists show an outstanding competence. Another advantage is our extreme attentiveness to customers' needs and our ability to react to their demands quickly. Our instruments are developed in a tight collaboration with customers; we take into account their actual wishes and we strive to provide both technical and methodological support everywhere in Russia without any delay.
What areas of industry and science are using Agilent equipment?
Our equipment is used in a plenty of areas spanning from pharmaceutical and food industry to nuclear power plants. Surely, you could find Agilent solutions wherever there is analytical chemistry, wherever there is an analysis.
Let me tell about the major areas. It is pharmaceutical industry including drug development and quality control. It is food industry, chemical and petrochemical industry, material analysis, industrial monitoring. It is environmental monitoring, including analysis of drinking water and wastewaters, soil samples, industrial emissions, and so on. Such important areas as criminal investigations, forensic examination, and doping control, should also be mentioned. Our instruments are installed in several Russian metrological institutions; a number of official measurement standards were developed using Agilent instruments.
We can successfully serve so many areas due to, one the one hand, our extremely broad portfolio, and, on the other hand, because any particular instrument is universal to some extent. For instance, the same HPLC system can be adapted to almost any task for any area by just changing column and mobile phase. Some of our instruments, however, are very specialized for particular tasks. For example, we produce analyzers of metabolic turnover in living cells through a recent acquisition of Seahorse Biosciences.
Which Agilent instrumental solutions and technological innovations you could mention as the most successful?
In fact, any instrument we bring into the market is based on our technological innovations, it has something fairly new. As examples, I would mention ICP-OES 5100, the optical emission spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma, and GC 5977B, the advanced GC-MS system. The ICP-OES 5100 has disproved a conventional opinion that all ICP spectrometers are huge and heavy. It is at least twice smaller and lighter than all such instruments existing before, while its productivity is three times better. GC 5977B is a fifth or sixth generation GC/MS system, a highly advanced member of our GC/MS systems line which has a great success at the market since more than 20 years. It’s a good example of regular innovations which allow staying at the top for a long time.
There are quite many examples of Agilent’s successful technological innovations. In the area of spectroscopy, which is the most familiar to me, Agilent around two years ago has constructed 8800 ICP-QQQ, a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma. This was a breakthrough innovation which brought a fundamental reserch to a new level. Another example is atomic emission spectrometers 4100 MP-AES and 4200 MP-AES which use microwave plasma for elemental analysis of metals. Any external gases, such as argon which is rather expensive, are not required for plasma. The only gas consumed by these spectrometers is nitrogen, and it can be easily obtained from air using a nitrogen generator. Such instruments can work even at the places where gas vessels could not be delivered or installed.
We use a complete set of information from various channels while developing our new instruments or upgrading the existing models. First, we stay always well informed about customer needs. Our specialists work in a close cooperation with leading research and industrial organizations all over the world, including Russia. Second, our company has a network of Agilent Research Laboratories, where our researchers are studying basic principles of analytical methods. We are constantly looking for ways to get the most use of our existing and developing instrumental solutions.
Customers often take part in the development of our solutions. An example of such fruitful cooperation is a software for nanoparticle analysis using 7900 ICP-MS, our new mass spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma. The nanoparticles analysis is of great importance in food quality control, ecological monitoring of natural air and pond water, and many other areas. This software had been developed by our engineers together with research organizations among our customers.
What are the changes in customer requirements during last years? What was Agilent’s response to these changes?
Three aspects became the most actual in a recent time. This is productivity increase, ease of use, and the software in Russian language. It’s not unexpected that the requirements for productivity are constantly increasing. More and more samples are being analyzed, and the time of each single analysis becomes critical. High throughput screening requires thousands of samples to be analyzed each day. That is why we develop instruments which produce results much faster than, for example, a decade ago. Besides that, each year the complexity of analyzing mixtures is increased and much lower concentrations of target compounds are to be detected. Since that, the requirements for sensitivity, resolution, and other technical parameters are becoming stricter each year.
Another modern trend of development is making our equipment more easy to use. Nowadays, our instruments are applied for simple routine tasks more often than before. Sometimes they could be operated by undergraduate or high school students. Since that, we are asked to simplify all necessary operations, including start procedures and method programming. To facilitate the work of Russian operators, we translate into Russian all the software, user interfaces, and manuals.
Most of technical problems can be successfully solved by operator, without calling a service. We have a trend to simplify the self-service and maintenance procedures. For this, our systems are designed allowing an easy access to all key units and junctions. We put step-by-step user guides (including Russian-language ones) for service and maintenance into our instruments, as well as self-diagnostic modules that can generally detect a problem and suggest its optimal solution. Otherwise, our technical assistants can detect a problem based on a phone talk with an operator, and suggest a solution.
The "retrograde compatibility" is an important feature of our chromatography systems and some other instruments which include several modules. All our equipment is designed to be used for as long time as possible. Nevertheless, one may easily bring a new piece of technology into the old instrument. A customer can buy a new detector, a new autosampler, etc., and it should fit into the existing system. Our company pays a substantial attention to the compatibility of newly developing modules with their analogues produced before. So, our customers can benefit from the newest technologies, even there is no possibility to buy a whole new system at once.
Are there any instruments for the limited budget or for educational purposes in your portfolio?
Many of our customers say that although they like our high technology instruments, it would be better to have non-expensive simplified analogues for routine procedures and education. We could answer that every of our product lines includes simple and low price instruments. For instance, we have a budget gas chromatography system 7820A GC, we have a non-expensive HPLC system Agilent 1220 Infinity LC. Besides the low price, such instruments are extremely easy in operating. But they still show the same quality and robustness as their advanced analogues. Definitely, a solution for every budget can be found in our portfolio.
Thank you for the interesting story!
A.Kistner was interviewed by S.Zhokhov
Agilent Technologies is a strong player at the global market. For more than a decade, Agilent Technologies keeps leading positions at the market of analytical chemistry equipment, first of all, of liquid and gas chromatography systems, mass spectrometers, and spectrosсopic systems for elemental analysis. A key focus of the entire company is to provide customer laboratories with modern top quality equipment, which would improve the efficiency of laboratory analysis and scientific research. A fingerprint of Agilent Technologies is building of reliable, trustworthy, long-term relationships with any customer. Agilent Technologies delivers instruments and makes service in any place of Russia, in a very short time. Dr. Andreas Kistner told us about the key features of Agilent’s Russian business and about changes in customer needs within the last years, as well as how Agilent responds to them.
Andreas, could you please tell about the areas and strategies of Agilent’s business in Russia?
Agilent’s main ambition is bringing the most hi-tech and robust equipment into the analytical laboratories. This was the starting point of our business, and this is what we are doing over last four decades. We are particularly known in Russia for supplying high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography (GC) systems, mass spectrometers – that’s all what we are calling our "core business". Another key segment of our market is the spectroscopic equipment, first of all, the spectroscopic elemental analyzers. We have made some outstanding technological innovations in this area, which represented a basis for the construction of our new instruments.
Agilent’s world market includes European, African, and Asia-Pacific countries. Since our markets are much different from each other, we use several operating strategies; sometimes we sell and service our equipment directly, but sometimes through the distributor network. In most countries we have organized our direct representative offices and we operate through them. Sometimes we can directly deliver our production from USA to other countries. But in some other countries we make sales and service through our partner organizations and distributors.
Russian market is quite specific, since there are so many different customers having various needs and possibilities. Since that, any unique business model, even the most proper one, would not be effective; several models must be used at the same time. Agilent applies a so-called "blended channel strategy" for Russia, operating both directly and through our partner organizations. Our direct representative company in Moscow is named "Agilent Technologies OOO", and its specialists are distributed throughout Russia, providing quick and convenient customer support in any country region. We have not only local technicians and service engineers in Russian regions, but also sales managers and product specialists. All Agilent specialists working in Russia are regularly invited for our training courses.
In addition to direct business in Russia, Agilent has a network of partner organizations across the country, which act mainly as distributors of our instruments and consumables. Most of our new production is sold in Russia through distributors; we perform direct sales much less often, mostly to large companies which are our customers for a long time. Service and after-sale support is generally provided by specialists of Agilent's direct representative. However, the technical maintenance should be done immediately after the instrument goes wrong. So we could sometimes redirect the service to our partners for shortening the delay.
In order to study and train Agilent specialists including those working in Russia, several years ago we founded a modern educational and training center in Waldbronn, a place in the south-western Germany. We continue to invest into this training facility, as it is quite important to keep our specialists trained in all new trends and technologies. All our specialists are being invited for regular trainings. We provide a number of training programs, which are tailor made for each kind of specialist. The training of technicians and service engineers is a special task. They should disassemble and reassemble the instrument including all modules by their own, and repeat this for many times. Such training could not be performed in a lecture room, it requires special facilities. Our center in Waldbronn is one of four or five places over the world where the technicians could be educated and regularly trained. Besides that, Agilent has other training centers, which are located in Australia, China, and Japan.
How could you effectively perform and expand your business under unstable economic conditions of today’s Russia?
Our tradition is to build very robust structures which can operate under most circumstances. In Russia we have already organized an effective business. We have built a team of partners whom we can fully trust, and our mutually fruitful cooperation is lasting for many years.
Like other global market players, we regularly face economic rises and falls at some particular markets as well as volatility of currencies. Under such circumstances, we continue to focus on doing what we always used to do, providing high quality production to our customers. Everybody who has our equipment would always need consumables and spare parts, even when it is not possible to buy a new instrument. In today’s Russia we put more focus to the markets of service and after-sale support, although we still have new sales. Our operations at the after-sale market help us to establish stronger connections with customers, which is extremely important for a good business during economical instability period. Another factor providing our stability is an extensive portfolio which includes a broad pallet of solutions different in functionality and price. Customers have a big choice and could always find something to be satisfied with.
What are Agilent’s competitive advantages in Russia?
Our main competitive advantage is a broad experience in the instrument development and production, especially in our "core business" segment, i.e., liquid and gas chromatography systems and mass spectrometers. All our specialists show an outstanding competence. Another advantage is our extreme attentiveness to customers' needs and our ability to react to their demands quickly. Our instruments are developed in a tight collaboration with customers; we take into account their actual wishes and we strive to provide both technical and methodological support everywhere in Russia without any delay.
What areas of industry and science are using Agilent equipment?
Our equipment is used in a plenty of areas spanning from pharmaceutical and food industry to nuclear power plants. Surely, you could find Agilent solutions wherever there is analytical chemistry, wherever there is an analysis.
Let me tell about the major areas. It is pharmaceutical industry including drug development and quality control. It is food industry, chemical and petrochemical industry, material analysis, industrial monitoring. It is environmental monitoring, including analysis of drinking water and wastewaters, soil samples, industrial emissions, and so on. Such important areas as criminal investigations, forensic examination, and doping control, should also be mentioned. Our instruments are installed in several Russian metrological institutions; a number of official measurement standards were developed using Agilent instruments.
We can successfully serve so many areas due to, one the one hand, our extremely broad portfolio, and, on the other hand, because any particular instrument is universal to some extent. For instance, the same HPLC system can be adapted to almost any task for any area by just changing column and mobile phase. Some of our instruments, however, are very specialized for particular tasks. For example, we produce analyzers of metabolic turnover in living cells through a recent acquisition of Seahorse Biosciences.
Which Agilent instrumental solutions and technological innovations you could mention as the most successful?
In fact, any instrument we bring into the market is based on our technological innovations, it has something fairly new. As examples, I would mention ICP-OES 5100, the optical emission spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma, and GC 5977B, the advanced GC-MS system. The ICP-OES 5100 has disproved a conventional opinion that all ICP spectrometers are huge and heavy. It is at least twice smaller and lighter than all such instruments existing before, while its productivity is three times better. GC 5977B is a fifth or sixth generation GC/MS system, a highly advanced member of our GC/MS systems line which has a great success at the market since more than 20 years. It’s a good example of regular innovations which allow staying at the top for a long time.
There are quite many examples of Agilent’s successful technological innovations. In the area of spectroscopy, which is the most familiar to me, Agilent around two years ago has constructed 8800 ICP-QQQ, a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma. This was a breakthrough innovation which brought a fundamental reserch to a new level. Another example is atomic emission spectrometers 4100 MP-AES and 4200 MP-AES which use microwave plasma for elemental analysis of metals. Any external gases, such as argon which is rather expensive, are not required for plasma. The only gas consumed by these spectrometers is nitrogen, and it can be easily obtained from air using a nitrogen generator. Such instruments can work even at the places where gas vessels could not be delivered or installed.
We use a complete set of information from various channels while developing our new instruments or upgrading the existing models. First, we stay always well informed about customer needs. Our specialists work in a close cooperation with leading research and industrial organizations all over the world, including Russia. Second, our company has a network of Agilent Research Laboratories, where our researchers are studying basic principles of analytical methods. We are constantly looking for ways to get the most use of our existing and developing instrumental solutions.
Customers often take part in the development of our solutions. An example of such fruitful cooperation is a software for nanoparticle analysis using 7900 ICP-MS, our new mass spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma. The nanoparticles analysis is of great importance in food quality control, ecological monitoring of natural air and pond water, and many other areas. This software had been developed by our engineers together with research organizations among our customers.
What are the changes in customer requirements during last years? What was Agilent’s response to these changes?
Three aspects became the most actual in a recent time. This is productivity increase, ease of use, and the software in Russian language. It’s not unexpected that the requirements for productivity are constantly increasing. More and more samples are being analyzed, and the time of each single analysis becomes critical. High throughput screening requires thousands of samples to be analyzed each day. That is why we develop instruments which produce results much faster than, for example, a decade ago. Besides that, each year the complexity of analyzing mixtures is increased and much lower concentrations of target compounds are to be detected. Since that, the requirements for sensitivity, resolution, and other technical parameters are becoming stricter each year.
Another modern trend of development is making our equipment more easy to use. Nowadays, our instruments are applied for simple routine tasks more often than before. Sometimes they could be operated by undergraduate or high school students. Since that, we are asked to simplify all necessary operations, including start procedures and method programming. To facilitate the work of Russian operators, we translate into Russian all the software, user interfaces, and manuals.
Most of technical problems can be successfully solved by operator, without calling a service. We have a trend to simplify the self-service and maintenance procedures. For this, our systems are designed allowing an easy access to all key units and junctions. We put step-by-step user guides (including Russian-language ones) for service and maintenance into our instruments, as well as self-diagnostic modules that can generally detect a problem and suggest its optimal solution. Otherwise, our technical assistants can detect a problem based on a phone talk with an operator, and suggest a solution.
The "retrograde compatibility" is an important feature of our chromatography systems and some other instruments which include several modules. All our equipment is designed to be used for as long time as possible. Nevertheless, one may easily bring a new piece of technology into the old instrument. A customer can buy a new detector, a new autosampler, etc., and it should fit into the existing system. Our company pays a substantial attention to the compatibility of newly developing modules with their analogues produced before. So, our customers can benefit from the newest technologies, even there is no possibility to buy a whole new system at once.
Are there any instruments for the limited budget or for educational purposes in your portfolio?
Many of our customers say that although they like our high technology instruments, it would be better to have non-expensive simplified analogues for routine procedures and education. We could answer that every of our product lines includes simple and low price instruments. For instance, we have a budget gas chromatography system 7820A GC, we have a non-expensive HPLC system Agilent 1220 Infinity LC. Besides the low price, such instruments are extremely easy in operating. But they still show the same quality and robustness as their advanced analogues. Definitely, a solution for every budget can be found in our portfolio.
Thank you for the interesting story!
A.Kistner was interviewed by S.Zhokhov
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