“You’ll never see a product with our logo…we’re what our customers want us to be,” says Jonatan Gustafsson, business applications manager at Kitron Group, a leading Scandinavian electronics manufacturing services (EMS) company that’s headquartered in Asker, Norway.
Kitron works across the value chain of electronics from design and development through to manufacturing, service and upgrades. It may not be a marquee name outside its domain, but Kitron has scale and breadth. It reported around €738m in annual revenues for its last fiscal year, has about 3,000 staff and has an operational footprint that extends across Europe, Asia and North America. As for its electronics products, it serves businesses in everything from connectivity and electrification to industry and defence/aviation via medical devices.
This is classic enterprise resource planning (ERP) territory, and Kitron is a prized customer of IFS, a software company that is also from Scandinavia and is squarely focused on industry. Kitron is a company that works under the hood of customers – and under its own hood is IFS, where it’s has been core to operations for 15 years.
Gustafsson says: “Since we span from Europe to the US, China, Malaysia and India, we have people working around the clock. So it’s important to be stable, have a solid foundation and make sure that everything is available all the time, from the shop floor and reporting production to financial reporting.”
In environments such as this where multiple-nines uptime is essential and domain expertise has high relevance, it’s important that supplier and customer have stronger bonds than those of an everyday tech-buyer relationship.
“We’ve had a great relationship with IFS and we’ve been able to influence and have a tight connection,” Gustafsson says. “IFS is strong in the EMS domain in the Nordics and it’s nice to know there’s a lot of competence. Within an hour from where I live, there’s a lot of competent people in the area and a big consulting and knowledge base in the region. That makes the people working with the system stronger.”
Kitron is expanding rapidly with a stated aim of becoming a €1.5bn annual revenue player, and it is trying to do so without losing its central controls and culture.
“We have special systems in some areas but it’s usually IFS in the background supplying and feeding other systems for product and maintenance, Gustafsson says. “Kitron is a fast-growing company and we’re trying to have a standardised approach using the ‘One Kitron’ unified model.”
Up close and personal
Gustafsson is taking practical steps to build intimacy and influence in the IFS ecosystem:| “First, we’ve been part of the company advisory board so we’re not just looking a year ahead. And then we have the partner network which is quite well established, so we have access to people with specific competence in the ecosystem that we talk to at partner conferences.
“We are in countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, and we know that with the IFS partner ecosystem we can find, if not IFS itself, then a network partner operating at a certain level, with local domain knowledge in any area.”
That level of intimacy is proving of value as Kitron upgrades to the latest IFS software offerings. “We are in the process of upgrading to the latest generation of IFS Cloud but we’re using the functionality through mobile devices and we’re not being locked down to a PC or whatever other fixed device,” Gustafsson says.
Cloud would appear to be a good fit for a company with wide geographic spread and ambitions to scale. “We have a lot of global support functions, sourcing, procurement…and we want to be efficient in what we do,” Gustafsson adds.
An example of that growth came recently from the defence industry where Kitron recently announced it had picked up a €16m order for products used in counter-drone systems.
Here comes AI
Despite their focus on operational excellence and lean manufacturing, Kitron’s IT leaders see value in the ever-changing technology landscape and, inevitably, artificial intelligence (AI).
“AI and an agentic framework can go from 25% progress and it’s going to learn along the way how to complete a product. We’re seeing a technology shift in utilising AI but [the opportunity and challenge] is not so much about IT but people and change,” Gustafsson says.
“The opportunity is to set the foundation and let it learn along the way. People have to treat it not as an RPA [robotic process automation] flow following rules but as a tool that learns. Kitron has roots that go back into the 1960s with waterfall type of development and we’re moving into a more Agile sort of development.
“How do we get people working as efficiently as possible together with AI instead of performing repetitive manual tasks? How do you scale without having to hire? It’s very important that people are interested and enjoying it. People have to get on board to be successful as we’re in a world constantly changing and we have to learn, learn, learn. But before starting to hand out information to LLMs [large language models], we are relying on our security framework and keeping safety first when it comes to data.”
AI will doubtless change EMS just as it will change everything but Kitron ultimately wants to keep its feet on the ground and outperform on operations.
“We are a manufacturing company and that’s where we’re making our money,” Gustafsson says. “Stable and efficient operations – that’s what’s paying our salary and that’s what I tell my staff.”
