Industrial doors from Efaflex lead the world because they combine premium manufacturing, super high-speed operation and exciting energy-saving opportunities, writes Paul Hamblin, Logistics Business Features Editor.
Efaflex builds and supplies some of the world’s fastest high-speed industrial doors for a wide range of settings – 16 sectors at the most recent count – and you know the German-founded company is confident of that speed because the company familiar logo carries the image of a cheetah, the world’s fastest land animal. That’s confidence.
Such confidence can often be misplaced, of course. The fact that Efaflex delivers on its promises is testament to the long-term global reach and reputation of the company. Even doors with a 10,000mm width can achieve a door leaf speed of 1 m/s. The company says its fastest vertically opening high-speed door is able to achieve top speeds of more than 4 m/s.
Technological and engineering excellence are core to the Efaflex success story. Unique spiral technology enables the door to be both faster and lighter than the competition, while safety is ensured by a myriad range of sensors, all supplied specifically to suit customer needs. “Our consultants can prescribe exactly what you as a customer require,” Head of Marketing Christian Jacob (pictured below) tells me. “There is an individual light and sensor grid inside every door we produce. It will integrate with the manual labour workforce or seamlessly integrate in a Smart warehouse setting incorporating AGVs and AMRs,” he adds.
All doors are manufactured at the company’s plant in the Czech Republic. The latest generation continues to push the boundaries. “It’s about more platform thinking in important areas such as spare parts and the interior of the door,” explains Jacob. “So, even if the shutters vary, each door will have the same framework, which facilitates spare parts efficiency as well as overall maintenance. The beauty is all on the inside, if you like.”
Enabling Customer Sustainability
A central focus of the company’s ethos is to assist in the sustainability efforts of its customers. “We do that by ensuring we provide the door which best saves customer energy consumption,” he reveals. “We start that process directly with the customer, establishing what matters to them so that we can then add to their sustainability story. This is about starting from the customer’s perspective.”
Efaflex has introduced EFA-EnergySaver, an easy-to-use tool available to all visitors to its website. Applicable by use case – workshop, production facility or warehouse – in a few clicks you can gain a detailed comparison of potential energy savings via scrutiny of such details as door size and dimensions, door speed, number of doors, opening cycles per day, productive days per year and heating/cooling costs.
All Efaflex doors are high-speed, whether spiral, roll-up or folding, or a clean room or machine protection door. How do customers know which type should be selected, though? “It depends on the hole in the wall and where it is,” he laughs, before elaborating, “You won’t have a fabric door in an outdoor-setting, for instance.”
He won’t reveal how many doors Efaflex installs per year across the globe, other than to quote a figure “in the thousands”. This is fair enough: Efaflex remains a family-owned business and is under no obligation to quote such figures.
Jacob is in broad agreement with the current sentiments around wider market uncertainty, but counters that Efaflex’s order book is “vivid”, adding that sectoral ups and downs are part of business. “We supply 16 different verticals,” he adds. “In these 16, one will always be under pressure; at the moment, automotive is a good example of that, so two current strong points for us, for instance, are in food and in supplying doors for public parking security in urban environments.”
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