While congratulating Ficep France for this important milestone, we would like to share with our readers the most significant steps of the company history.
Ficep France was founded beginning of February 1988 with Mr. Yves Troy as President of the company, his wife Mrs. Marie Paule Troy as Accounting Manager and Mr. Lionel Martinat in charge of the machines installation and After Sales Service Department. Few months later, Mr. Eric Patat, today President and Commercial Manager of Ficep France, joined the company as Sales Manager. In one year they were 8 people, included 4 technicians dedicated for After Sales Service.
The great commercial attitude of Mr. Troy pushed the company to start immediately with important activities to promote FICEP brand in all the main Steel Fabricators and Forging companies.
In Autumn ’88 they invited a delegation of the SCMF (Association of French Steel Fabricators) to visit FICEP headquarters in Gazzada and a few months later they organised a large Open House in Gazzada to show our reality to the most important Steel Fabricators, and demonstrate our capabilities in terms of production and research and development.
This approach allowed them in a couple of years to double the sales forecasts of CNC machines!
Due to the high request for machines delivery, Ficep France soon realized the necessity to start assembling the CNC lines locally, in order to offer prompt deliveries to the local customers and increase their presence on the market. The result was exactly what they targeted!
In February 1990, Ficep France inaugurated their facilities in Camblanes: 1250 square meters of workshop and 510 square meters of offices, and they started the assembly of the first single spindle drilling line, today well known worldwide as Excalibur: from 12 machines per year they reached a few years later an amount of 80 machines per year!
Due to the high sales volumes, Ficep France decided to start withdrawing FICEP second hand machines and consequently to set up retrofitting activities.
From 1998 the company has been constantly growing and today the Camblanes site reached a total area of 3750 square meters of workshop and 710 square meters of offices, with 42 employees!
Besides France, the subsidiary is actively involved for sales, after sales and spare parts supply in:
- Belgium;
- Luxemburg;
- Algeria;
- Morocco;
- Tunisia;
- Sub Saharan African countries;
- Nigeria;
- Ghana.
Particularly in the African countries, they have set up an organization to stock spare parts and consumables, in order to offer a faster and more efficient service for local customers.
We have asked to Mr. Yves Troy, today Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Ficep France, how he sees the company in the next 10 years:
“We will have to develop permanently the quality and efficiency of our service.
We should be ready to double or triple the quantity of retrofitted CNC Lines, and we will have to extend our workshop to reach 5.000 square meters. Also, we will improve the capacity of our showroom to offer several CNC machines on stock for quick delivery.
Today we are leaders in the full automation fabrication system, so the next step will probably be the full robotisation.
We must be prepared to integrate new technologies in our range of products and consequently to teach our employees accordingly.
We actually face difficulties to recruit technicians to travel so we must organise a network of Service Engineers in each different area in France and in Africa to reduce the time to reach a customer. That is the main goal for the Future!”