Martin By Harman: London to Budapest

MARTIN BY HARMAN: LONDON TO BUDAPEST

With Harman Professional Solutions making some major changes to manufacturing and R&D in the Martin Lighting arm of the business, TPi’s Stew Hume travels from the company’s London Experience Centre all the way to the manufacturing plant in Pécs, Hungary, to get the lowdown.

As you drive into the carpark of Harman’s Hemel-Hempstead office, you would be forgiven for thinking that this is yet another anonymous industrial park on the outskirts of London. However, once you pass through its glass doors, you step into a showcase room unlike any other. Due to the sheer scope of the Harman brand – not to mention the reach of its parent company, Samsung – you find that its products find their way into a variety of industries

The London Experience Centre, which houses a selection of ‘sets’ to demonstrate the various uses of its products, shows off the sheer volume of solutions that it can deliver to its customers. From a mock retail outlet that uses the latest custom recognition software to provide tailored adverts, to the hotel rooms with the latest Smart Technology giving a glimpse into future hospitality.

From the world of live touring, Harman demonstrated the latest JBL VTX A12s, on the live stage demo complete with a Soundcraft Vi2000 and a lighting rig with a collection of Martin by Harman fixtures. The later was actually the reason for TPi’s visit to the London headquarters, to hear from some of the Martin team – including Peter Skytte, Director of Lighting, as well as our tour guide for the next few days, Harman’s Director of Global Communications, David Glaubke – about the future of the lighting branch of the organisation.

Since Samsung’s acquisition of Harman in 2017, a great deal of work has gone into fine-turning the Martin Lighting side of the business. During the initial evaluation stage, the company created three goals: to optimise its R&D footprint; to improve product differentiation; and to boost the amount and speed at which new products come to market.

To achieve these goals, Harman went about consolidating its assets both in terms of people and locations. In 2017, there were over 14 engineering sites across the globe. This has now been concentrated into six locations, and the overall R&D engineering base for lighting has been boosted from 42 to 64 with the ability to rapidly scale up using engineering expertise deployed in other areas of the business. Since the reorganisation, Martin’s R&D footprint is now split between two sites. One is the Centre of Competence (CoC) in Denmark, which focuses on technology-enabled key differentiators in products, while the other is the Product Development (PD) centre, located in Shenzhen, China, which focuses on engineering excellence and fast project execution close to supplier base.

“Denmark is where the company is really pushing the future of lighting and where the technology will be in three to five years and beyond,” stated Glaubke, giving an overview of some of the changes within the company. “We have already got to see the result of this consolidation with the release of the MAC Allure.

“Then we have the Shenzhen operation, which is all about taking that engineered product prototype from Denmark and developing it further to bring it to market quickly, efficiently and cost effectively – ultimately to be built and shipped to customers here in Pécs.”

The message coming from Martin is that of streamlining its development and manufacturing process. It’s worth noting that this framework has also rolled out across the other divisions in the Harman family. Each arm of the Harman brand informs the others in the development of new products.

“Cross-division learning at Harman drives innovation in profound ways.” commented Glaubke. “For example, what we’re doing in Professional Solutions to develop the future of professional audio can impact developments in lifestyle and car audio.

“Conversely, the technology that Harman is creating for the connected car can influence development for Professional Solutions, such as in live events or hospitality industries. No other audio, lighting and control company has that level of access to engineering.”

During TPi’s time in the London, we got to hear about some of the latest innovations taking place under Martin’s roof, including future light source with alternative sources and new cooling technology.

To see the procedure first hand, TPi left Harman’s London facility and boarded a plane heading to Pécs, Hungary – a small town a few hours’ drive from Budapest city centre. Having opened in spring 2016, the Pécs facility oversees the creation of a number of Harman products including Studer, Soundcraft, Intellivox and Martin Lighting.

Greeting us at the facility were Senior Manager for Materials and Logistics, Istvan Prehoffer, and Senior Manager for Manufacturing Engineering, László Bencsik. Prehoffer starting proceedings by giving a brief history of the facility, which for over four decades has been involved in various electronic manufacturing with a variety of companies, including those in the telecommunications industry.

When Harman purchased the space in 2016, the group repurposed the 31,000 sq metre warehouse to conform with safety standards. With years of experience working with technology-based products, Harman had a huge pool of experts within the Pécs region to call upon in order to get the ball rolling with the state-of-the-art facility.

While walking through the warehouse, it was clear that quality control was of utmost importance. From the floor shaker to test product robustness, to the in-depth LED calibration, down to the individual circuit board tests, no stone was left unturned in making sure that each product met the grade. What was also impressive was how many manufacturing processes took place within the facility. One was the manufacture of circuit boards – done with the company’s own SMT line, which is tested rigorously to create the highest quality product. These tests include various QC checks, including X-ray machines to look at every individual solder joint. “This means that the circuit boards are of a much higher standard when they are sent into manufacturing,” commented Bencsik.

This level of detail remains even when the products go out the door, as Prehoffer explained. “We want to ensure that everything leaving the facility gets to the customer safely,” he said. “We have even run tests where we have put sensors in our packages, to decipher any points of issue within transit and how we might better prepare the products to ensure they are safe.”

Both Prehoffer and Bencsik had worked in the facility for some time for other companies that had used the manufacturing plant. Like many of their colleagues, both men had wealth of knowledge about manufacturing processes – a fact that Harman as a group clearly values. “We want to make our processes as efficient as possible,” commented Prehoffer, gesturing to a white board displaying several photographs from around the factory. On closer inspection, this ‘wall of fame’ proved as a record of new protocols, which had been brought in via the suggestion of those working on the warehouse floor. Any worker is able to suggest an idea that they think will improve working procedures and product quality.

Moving to another sector of the warehouse, Bencsik walked TPi through the multiple stages of the manually intensive process that goes into making each Martin fixture. “In total we have 120 people working solely on the production side the lighting fixtures,” he began. “We put them together from scratch – it’s like a Swiss watch, only bigger.”

How much bigger? Well, the largest fixture in its range, the MAC Viper, is made up of some 4,300 individual components. As you might imagine, to piece these fixtures together involves a regimented training scheme that takes place in house.

“It takes about a month and a half to train an engineer to be able to work on the production line,” stated Bencsik. “Once trained, however, any one of the workers is able to jump on the production line of any of the fixtures, as they all follow similar protocols and methods in production.”

The theory is that such a methodical level of manufacturing, backed up by consolidated R&D, can lead only to greater innovation down the line. “It’s one of the biggest things we learned from the consolidation process,” concluded Glaubke. “Originally all the brands under the Harman banner were operated as individual entities. But we believe as a group, consolidating manufacturing process is a good thing as we have been able to take the best elements from each brand and create a group-wide standard. Martin, like the rest of the brands, has certainly benefited from this and it will lead to greater innovations in the future.”

Photos: Harman

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