Hanna Instruments : Innovations with quality excellence
Mr. Kondiba Shivaji Metkari, Business Manager, Hanna Equipments (India) Pvt Ltd.
Q. Being the key player in the industry, Please brief us company’s journey from inception & share some of the milestones achieved?
Hanna Instruments was founded in Italy in 1978 by Anna and Oscar Nardo and currently its global headquarter is located in Woonsocket Rhode Island. We have 60 offices in more than 40 countries. I can say Hanna Instruments is truly world leader in innovation of analytical instrumentation. Look at how innovative products we are launching in laboratory market. In 1985 Hanna was first to introduce a pH electrode with built in temperature sensor. In 2013 Hanna has developed world’s first tablet sized laboratory meter. This hybrid meter can be used as wall mount, portable or bench top meter. In 2014 Hanna has launched world’s first pH electrode with Bluetooth Smart technology. Our recent innovation is world first pH meter with Bluetooth pH electrode This blutooth pH electrode can be used with our Edge blu pH meter or you can directly connect it to your ipad.
Q. What are the products manufactured by your company?
Hanna is one of the world’s biggest brands manufacturing Laboratory, Process and Field instruments for water quality testing. Our strength lies in our product range. We offer more than 3000 products and our R&D team continuously strive to develop new technics that simplify the testing procedures. We have products for testing major water parameters, parameters like pH, conductivity, Turbidity, TDS, Ammonia, Chlorine, COD/BOD, Dissolved Oxygen and many more. Apart from water testing we are supplying instruments for Agriculture, Aquaculture, Environmental, Food, dairy, Beverage and for other industry. We attempt to provide new innovative products at very affordable cost to our customers. We take pride in being one of the world’s leaders in innovation of analytical instrumentation.
Q. What is your marketing strategy for India?
Since 2010 Hanna India has been growing its presence to support our valued customers by having a field sales force and technical engineers in major cities throughout India. The cities include: Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Delhi, Luckhnow, Indore, Jaipur, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Cochin, Coimbatore, Baroda, Nagpur, Aurangabad, and Pune. This expansion highlights our philosophy to provide exceptional sales and support at local level. Soon we will be opening our local sales offices in major cities. We offer over 3000 products to its customer. One challenging task is the promotion and marketing of each instrument. One cannot afford to miss even one instrument. For that reason we have been investing a good amount towards exhibitions and tradeshows. This year also Hanna Instruments will make its presence at prominent exhibitions like aquatech, asialabex and many more. We also try to make awareness about our products through print publications. We also have used the social media platform for as marketing tool for increasing our brand awareness. Our presence of social media has helped us elevate our audience & customer base and brought us a step closer to them. Out short-term plan focuses on educating and training our customers by conducting seminars at pan India level. These seminars will target towards technically educating the customers on our instruments and its proper usage. Additionally we have been providing rigorous training to our employees to enhance knowledge and to keep them updated about the latest trends. As far as our long term plans are concerned, we working towards providing superior customer service. We don’t just want to meet our customers’ expectations, we want to excel them.
Q. Product innovation through R&D is vital to be forrader in the competition, as per your opinion , how does R&D plays the role of catalyst in the success process?
Our research and development has played an integral role in the success of Hanna Instruments. Through years it has paved the path of innovation. Keeping in view the Indian market, the company has introduced tablet size, slimmest multiparameter meter named edge which is suitable for laboratory as well as field application. It can measure pH, Conductivity, TDS ,Dissolved oxygen and Salinity. The instrument a perfect fit for several industries such as wine, waste water, drinking water, pharmaceutical, food and many more. This instrument has very good features and it is available on affordable cost for indian customer.Recently we have launched the world’s first pH meter that uses pH electrodes with Bluetooth® Smart technology. The HI2202 “edge blu” pH meter uses Hanna’s HALO™ pH electrodes (Bluetooth 4.0) that connect wirelessly to “edge blu” or a compatible iPad® running the Hanna Lab App. We are sure that Indian Customers will love this product, the meter can be used as portable, wall mount or bench top, the electrode connects to the meter wirelessly to about 10 meters. This meter is equipped with all the latest facilities like GLP, % point calibration, Cal check feature, Dual USB port,
Q. Quality standards are benchmarked by the product performance; please brief us how do you maintain the quality norms since from solution development to implementation?
Being a manufacturer and supplier of scientific products we very well know how important role our instruments play in different processes, hence we control the quality of our products from their inception to delivery. For this reason, we manufacture all the products we bring to the market including, meters, electrodes, chemical reagents and buffer solutions. Hanna Instrument is a vertically integrated manufacturer; we do not subcontract any part of the manufacturing process, from plastic molding, to glass blowing and chemical bottling, to PCB and electronic assemblies. All our products are designed, developed and engineered under ISO 9001 standards and CE directives. Each and every product undergoes stringent quality control tests at different stages of manufacturing. We follow several standards, our buffer solutions are manufactured as per NIST standard, our turbidity meters are in compliance with ISO and EPA standards. Most of our meters comply with IP 67 standards (dust tight and protected against effect of temporary immersion in water).
Q. How do you perceive the future of the industry ?
India offers vast opportunity for analytical instruments manufacturers, and lot of multinational brands are entering in to Indian market. Indian customers are looking for quality products, at the same time this market is very price sensitive. Hanna Instruments is trying to bridge this gap by providing high quality instruments at affordable price and that’s why recently we have launched our new range of pocket colorimeters ‘Checkers”. These checkers are good option for those customers who cannot afford to buy costly multipara meter photometers.
