>>> Interview with Branko Babić, founder, owner and director of the company Omniprojekt, on the occasion of celebrating the jubilee “30 years of work”. Author: Milena Zisk, VRT journalist

Our activity has no influence on the tourist offer of Vrnjačka Banja. We deal with sophisticated technology, project engineering, which means that the customer submits his problems to us, and we offer him our solution. We are specific in that we can produce any solution offered by our engineers in our own production facility, under fully controlled and standardized conditions. It is about clean technologies, which exclude us as potential polluters who can disturb the ambiance of Vrnjačka Banja in any sense.

Although the begining was uncertain, once the decision was made there was no turning back. My thoughts at that time were such that I saw no other possibility than to take my fate into my own hands, not expecting that someone else would do it for me. The decision was uncompromising, and the lucky circumstance at that moment was the proximity of the First Five-Year Plan, with enough quality personnel willing to join me in creating Omniprojekt. At the beginning of the 90s, we managed, with difficulty we broke into the Russian market, but from the beginning we were characterized by persistence and a clear determination to achieve our goal.

I don’t know how they thought, but I tried to find human resources first of all in the environment. The largest number of engineers were from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Kraljevo, which was good for both us and them. We offered them conditions that were attractive to them because they were the realization of their professional ambitions, but also ensured their livelihood. That was the motivation for a large number of young people who decided to stay in Omniprojekt despite the magnetic attraction of Belgrade and other big cities. Today, we have about 20 mechanical and electrical engineers, lawyers and economists in managerial or executive positions who are mostly from the surrounding area, but we also have cases of experts who came from Belgrade.

Our market is related to target groups that we have defined based on the equipment they need. The basic, and for us, the most important target group, from the beginning was the pharmaceutical industry, mainly because at that time there was no competition that could offer packaging equipment in the quality of Western manufacturers. Naturally, producers from the food, chemical, petrochemical, cosmetic and other industries also began to appear, and considering the limitedness of the Serbian market, it was inevitable to enter the foreign market, primarily the Russian market, where we have been continuously since 1997-2008. had their own representation. Of course, the market of Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the market of ex-Yugoslavia, opened up. However, our biggest success is exporting to the countries of the European Union, primarily Romania and Germany, and more recently Great Britain, where we even signed a contract on the representation of Omniprojekt.

You have to comply with the standards even on the domestic market, but the standards in the EU, especially in the pharmaceutical sector, are the most demanding. What makes us stand out is that we transferred all the standards and validation protocols we adopted on those machines as an internal standard in production for every customer, for every market and for all branches of industry.

I always liked to say that so far we have never had a thing that “got away from us” and, excluding some minor problems, I cannot remember a project or challenge that we have not successfully implemented.0