Inside a Pneumatics Manufacturer

Janatics makes pneumatics at scale: over 3,000 basic models and 32,500 variants, shipped to 42 countries from a plant in Coimbatore. I spent three weeks there watching how a company that size actually turns an order into a product.

I rotated through application design, R&D, pilot batch and production, following the chain end to end. A customer requirement becomes a drawing, the drawing becomes a validated assembly, and the assembly only ships once it has been tested. Seeing the handover points between those departments was the useful part: that is where time is won or lost.

I was fascinated by the products and demos they had built at the facility: a PLC programmed piano, a bus door system where I got to experiment with the sensors used for safety, and the didactic kits, on which I also ran a few quality tests.

I finished with two suggestions for cutting production time: batch-picking common components against order history rather than packing each unit individually, and fitting self-sealing valves or a status light so tubes could be disconnected without splash-back. Both came out of watching the same small delays repeat.