ATS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-02-08 published
ATS founder
WOERNER dies at 65
By Simon AVERY, Technology Reporter, Tuesday, February 8, 2005
- Page B7
Klaus WOERNER, the founder, chief executive officer and president
of ATS
Automation
Tooling
Systems
Inc., has died of cancer at
age 65, the company said.
Mr. WOERNER was one of the country's most successful immigrant
entrepreneurs. He trained as a clock maker and tool maker in
Germany before moving to Canada in 1960. Initially, he intended
to work on the Avro Arrow. Then prime minister John
DIEFENBAKER
cancelled the fighter plane project before the 20-year-old could
get his hands on it.
Instead, Mr.
WOERNER took jobs in Montreal, while he worked to
complete his Canadian high-school diploma and as he began evening
engineering courses. After several years, he moved to Toronto.
He founded
ATS in 1978 as a tool and die manufacturer, taking
out a second mortgage on his home and investing $70,000. After
the company landed several large contracts, Mr.
WOERNER steered
it into the then-nascent area of robotics. Today,
ATS designs
and produces automated manufacturing and test systems for big
companies in the automotive, electronics, medical and consumer
products industries. The Cambridge, Ontario, firm employs about
4,000 people and posted annual sales of $665-million in 2004.
Shares of
ATA fell 27 cents to close at $12.15 yesterday on the
Toronto Stock Exchange.
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ATS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-02-14 published
Klaus Dietmar
WOERNER,
Entrepreneur 1939-2005
The German-born tool-and-die maker with enormous willpower founded
ATS, a Kitchener, Ontario, company that is now a global leader
in automated manufacturing solutions, Sandra
MARTIN writes
By Sandra MARTIN,
Monday,
February 14, 2005 - Page S6
A precision mechanic who arrived in Canada in 1960 with nothing
but his skill, energy and ambition, Klaus
WOERNER went on to
become the founder of
ATS, a specialized designer and supplier
of automation systems, that now has 4,000 employees in 26 locations
around the world and annual sales of more than $650-million.
He was named Canadian Entrepreneur of the Year in 1997.
He wasn't a big man, but he was powerful. When he walked into
a room, you could feel the crackle in the air. He could be impatient,
and when he got excited his slight German accent became more
pronounced, but he was very approachable and he never held a
grudge.
"There was no way you could work with Klaus and not be Friends
with him," said Ron
JUTRAS, who has succeeded Mr.
WOERNER as
president of
ATS. "He was a very good judge of character and
he always had time for people. It didn't matter what your role
was in the company, he would find a way to include you in social
gatherings."
Although he wanted people in the company to bring him solutions,
not problems, one of his best skills was problem solving. "He
loved rolling up his sleeves and getting into a problem," Mr.
JUTRAS said.
"Klaus could walk into a factory and he could see the opportunities
to improve it through automation and how he could make a real
difference," said Lawrence
TAPP, chair of the
ATS board, "and
he recognized the importance of the trades and apprenticeships,
which we really needed from a Canadian perspective."
"He was a business giant," said member of provincial parliament
Elizabeth WITMER, former deputy premier of Ontario, "but more
important, he was a very compassionate, generous human being
who gave a tremendous amount back to his community, never expecting
anything in return."
Klaus WOERNER, the youngest of three sons of Karl and Alice
(GREMPER,)
was born in Tiengen in the Black Forest area of Germany, just
after the outbreak of the Second World War. Becoming a toolmaker
was his dream but his hometown was too small to have an apprenticeship
program. He went first to Waldshut to do an apprenticeship as
a watch and clock maker and then to Switzerland to study tool
and die making.
After completing a four-year apprenticeship as a precision mechanic
at Braun Boverei in Switzerland, he applied for visas to Australia,
South Africa and Canada, intending to immigrate to whichever
country accepted him first. Canada won and he arrived in Montreal
in 1960 with a job waiting for him, or so he thought, in aviation.
He showed up for work and learned his employer had shut down
because of the cancellation of the Avro Arrow program the previous
February. He spent his first 14 years in Canada working at technical
jobs and as a watch and clock maker for jeweller Gabriel Lucas
in his celebrated Sherbrooke Street studio. Meanwhile, he finished
his high school diploma and then studied industrial engineering
at night at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University in
Montreal. Through Friends, he met his wife Anna, then a nursing
student at the Royal Victoria Hospital, in the mid-1960s. "He
was very charming, very elegant and very ambitious," his widow
said this week. They married in Canada's centennial year and
moved to Toronto in 1969 because they were worried about the
economic and political instability in Quebec.
He worked for Litton Systems, then went full-time to Ryerson
Polytechnical Institute (now University) to complete his engineering
qualifications before working at the Ford Motor Company's Oakville
truck plant, installing assembly lines, and then working as an
engineering supervisor at Electrohome Ltd., a television manufacturer,
in Kitchener.
When Electrohome decided to wind down its television business,
Mr. WOERNER went out on his own and, in 1978, founded Automation
Tooling Systems
(ATS,) a start-up company in Kitchener building
specialized equipment to enable manufacturers to take advantage
of new technology.
"The idea of going into industrial automation was really sparked
at Ford," Mr.
WOERNER told Canadian Business magazine in 1998.
"I installed all these automated weld machines and welding robots
there. It was really fun work."
From those early days of building specialized machinery for the
automotive industry, the company has since designed and built
more than 10,000 automation systems for telecommunications, fibre
optics, solar energy and other industries.
ATS was always a family business. Mr.
WOERNER put a $70,000 second
mortgage on his house for cash flow, his wife Anna, who was raising
their two children and working part-time as a nurse, put in half-days
doing secretarial work. Sales reached $370,000 that first year
and grew to $1-million the next. By 1984, the company had $4-million
in revenues and was growing so fast that it was consuming cash
as quickly as he produced it in sales. The company was profitable,
but it needed more working capital than Mr.
WOERNER could provide
from a line of credit at his local bank. It was the bank which
suggested to Mr.
WOERNER that a chartered accountant might help
him increase his financing capability.
"I came to his office, and the level of activity was mind-boggling,"
Mr. JUTRAS said. "It was a beehive of activity. There was a tremendous
pulse and energy level."
Mr. WOERNER was wearing many different hats and working closely
with a bunch of people who were committed to working with him
and who shared his vision, according to Mr.
JUTRAS. "It was inspiring."
Essentially, Mr.
JUTRAS never left. He tested his boss early
on to see if he really wanted somebody to help him on the finance
side. "I made him spend the money on an ad in The Globe and Mail
and when he did it, I said, 'I guess he's serious,' so then I
asked him if he would hire me, and he said absolutely and I came
to work with him [as Chief Financial Officer] and off we went."
That was June of 1985, the year revenues hit $9-million.
"Klaus always wanted to minimize the bureaucracy and to have
an environment that was very team oriented and didn't have an
ivory tower. I can remember him articulating his vision early
on and getting out the white board and mapping out where he wanted
to go. It was exciting."
Mr. JUTRAS helped to find outside investment from Aer Lingus,
which gave the airline a 75-per-cent controlling interest in
ATS.
Giving up such a big share of the company was very hard
for Mr. WOERNER, but he knew he needed the outside capital. Then
in the early 1990s, after having survived downturns in the automotive
and computer electronics industries, Aer Lingus was itself struggling
as a result of the rising fuel costs brought on by the Persian
Gulf war. They wanted to divest themselves of
ATS and Mr.
WOERNER
seized the opportunity to retake control of his company through
an employee-management buy-back offer.
A business connection who became a friend is Robert
WARREN, a
lawyer in the Kitchener office of Miller Thomson. He was brought
in by Mr. JUTRAS to help with the first annual meeting after
the company went public in 1993, a move that brought in the capital
to enable ATS to expand globally. From the beginning, Mr.
WARREN
was impressed by his client's energy, work ethic and loyalty
to his Friends, customers and employees. "He was a horse," Mr.
WARREN said. "He was so strong and he lived to work. You always
knew where you stood with him and I can't think of a nicer man
that I've ever had the pleasure of working with."
Although they didn't know each other at the time, Robert "Bob"
FERCHAT worked at Ford doing financial analysis at the same time
as Mr. WOERNER was working in the technical area. They met and
compared notes in totally different circumstances when Mr.
FERCHAT,
who has held a number of executive positions at Northern Telecom
and BCE
Mobile
Communications and other firms, was invited to
join the board of
ATS in 1997.
A self-described fan of Mr.
WOERNER,
Mr.
FERCHAT said he had
enormous will power and the energy to back it up and that showed
both in the creation of
ATS and in his ability to make it survive
through the downturns in both the high-tech and automotive industries
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were no layoffs at
ATS
during those tough times because Mr.
WOERNER insisted on absorbing
the costs of keeping his people working. "He was very loyal to
his employees," Mr.
FERCHAT said, pointing out that the
ATS management
buyout in 1993 was offered to staff, who responded on a broad
level. "He wanted them to share in his wealth and he was frustrated
if the stock went down."
"There were no airs about him," said John
TIBBITS, president
of Conestoga College in Kitchener. "He was very direct so you
never had to do a 'song and dance' for him if you wanted something."
Describing Mr.
WOERNER as one of Conestoga College's best Friends,
Mr. TIBBITS said the relationship with
ATS began in the late
1980s with co-op programs. "It was symbiotic. As they grew, we
grew, too, in a number of areas, a key one being robotics and
automation," he said.
Over the years,
ATS gave cash, equipment, program advisers, apprenticeship
programs, even an engineering building, amounting to an overall
gift of at least $10-million since the mid 1990s. And he strong-armed
other community leaders to make big donations as well. At least
400 Conestoga graduates work at
ATS.
ATS workers and students weren't the only recipients of the
WOERNER
family's generosity. Six years ago the family gave $5-million
to Kitchener's Centre in the Square performing arts theatre.
They tried to give the money anonymously but the centre wanted
to announce it publicly to help in their fundraising. Nevertheless,
they declined an offer to rename the facility in their honour.
They also gave money to local hospitals, to the University of
Waterloo to establish a laboratory for automated manufacturing
research and $100,000 to Ms.
WITMER's unsuccessful run against
Ernie Eves in 2002 for the leadership of the Ontario Conservative
party.
The WOERNERs moved from a house in Kitchener to a 23-hectare
farm outside Cambridge in the early 1980s. That's where he practised
his serve in highly competitive matches on custom-built tennis
courts with his wife and Friends. That's also where, perhaps
in an homage to the denuded Black Forest area of his birth, he
exercised his green thumb by planting more than 100,000 trees
over the years.
Less than a year ago his famous energy flagged and his strength
diminished. Faced with a five-week wait for an M.R.I. in Ontario,
he went to the U.S. and was diagnosed with small-cell carcinoma.
He kept on working, often having chemotherapy in the morning
and then heading straight to the office. His only concession
to ill health was to work four days a week, staying home on Fridays
to recoup his strength.
"If will power could overcome cancer, he would have beaten it,"
said Mr. FERCHAT, adding that the challenge now is to honour
his legacy. "Nobody will be moving into his office or his parking
space for a long time."
Klaus Dietmar
WOERNER was born in Tiengen, Germany, on October
27, 1939. He died of cancer at home on February 7. He was 65.
He is survived by his wife, Anna, two children and three grandchildren.
A memorial service was set for today at Centre In The Square,
101 Queen St. N., in Kitchener, Ontario
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