When viewed from the outside, the interior of the stainless steel foundry at Otto Junker GmbH appears to be pitch-black. „Therefore the lads have to be as bright as buttons,“ quips Ulrich Tigges with a smile alluding to the extremely difficult conditions in the foundry which are so demanding on his colleagues. Tigges is Fabrication Shop Manager for Otto Junker GmbH in Simmerath-Lammersdorf, an Eifel township in southwest North Rhine-Westphalia, only a stone‘s throw from the Belgian border.
Otto Junker, the company, has been in existence since 1924. Originally Otto Junker just built foundries. However, from providing furnaces for his customers over the years, he developed a new, separate side to his business, which operated independently of the heavy production engineering division.
Ownership of the corporate group today lies with the Otto-Junker-Stiftung, a trust dedicated to the promotion of engineering training. „It is certainly something special to work for a trust,“ declares Ulrich Tigges. „The close cooperation between Otto Junker and its customers is based on adopting a reasonable, calm manner of addressing one another, mutual understanding and open communication.“
