"This year's awards have a clear focus on our customers and how we as a Group aim to contribute and enable technology that transforms the future through innovation. Developing solutions together with the users truly showcase our customer focus, be it through enhanced end product quality or improved production up-time. Likewise, the innovation reducing water consumption is a solid testament to our sustainability commitment", said Vagner Rego, President and CEO of the Atlas Copco Group. 

The awards ceremony was held at the Annual General Meeting in Stockholm on April 29, and three awards were handed out.

The John Munck Award, established in 1988, is presented each year to reward the person or group of people who have produced the best innovative technical development contribution during the year. This year the award goes to Glyn Fargher, Anthony Salisbury, Matthew Stages, John Stewart and Kyle Weirauch in the Industrial Technique Business Area.

The team set out to come up with a rivet setter with unprecedented long life and high force requirements which proved to be a challenge as many millions of high-force cycles had to run without intervention. With the entrance of the Henrob G3 Setter Atlas Copco Group was able to present groundbreaking innovation in the field of rivet setting, designed to meet the evolving needs of modern manufacturing, and for this reason the team receives the John Munck Award.

The Peter Wallenberg Marketing and Sales Award, established in 1996, is presented each year to reward excellent salesmanship as well as the development and field implementation of more advanced and customer adapted marketing sales methods. This year, the award goes to Akshay Kale, Charles Legrand, Arthur Unterberger and Stefano Viazzi in the Compressor Technique Business Area.

Data collection from connected machines and business logic are useful and make for high quality automated sales leads, but at Atlas Copco Group we always strive to find an even better way of doing things. The winners of the Peter Wallenberg Marketing and Sales award added a lead engine to the system which processes the data with AI-driven algorithms. This addition has allowed for further predictictability and can alert customers to the need of preventative action. It also highly improves the marketing and sales leads for the Group.

The Giulio Mazzalupi Operational Excellence Award, established in 2018, aims to reward a person or a team with significant contributions to improving and executing processes aimed at delivering products or services to customers in the most satisfying, sustainable, cost-effective, and timely manner. This year the award goes to Chad Chen, Hongwei Wang and Frank Xu in the Vacuum Technique Business Area.

The team behind the Mechanical vapor recompression system receives the Giulio Mazzalupi Operational Excellence Award. Using the technology on our internal processes has had both environmental and operational benefits, the water can be reused and only a small part of concentrated contaminated water needs to be processed leading to an impressive up to 90 percent reduction in wastewater.