Revamped centre offers facilities for exploring Industry 4.0 and lightweighting
Together with over 200 guests, Engel opened its much extended and modernised subsidiary in Hannover on 9 and 10 May. The Austrian global market leader in injection-moulding machines and integrated injection-moulding system solutions invested around ¤5m in the location to equip itself for further growth in the German market and to meet future customer requirements.
Construction continued into March 2017 and lasted 12 months. The entire Engel Hannover team moved into an adjacent industrial building during the extensive refurbishment, which has doubled floor space.
A total of 2,400sqm is now available for the office wing, training centre, and the technology centre. The building has two floors covering the entire footprint and even the event and training area is now on two floors.
“Everything was completed on time to start operations,” said Christopher Vitz, managing director of Engel Deutschland GmbH at the Hannover location. “In the last few years, Germany has grown quite considerably. Now that we have the extension, we can meet this growth head-on and it also means we are even better equipped to meet current and future customer requirements.”
For several years, strong growth in Germany has been stoked by greater cross-border business. International companies based in Germany have made purchasing decisions in Germany and carried out project engineering for machines and production cells to be installed and operated in other countries.
“From a technological viewpoint, German processors are among the best in the world,” said Vitz. “When our customers expand onto new markets, project engineering very often takes place in Germany, at least at the beginning, since the technological know-how has to be built up at the foreign locations first. Due to its strong presence in Germany as well as on global markets, Engel is very well positioned to provide its customers with support on an international scale.”
“Germany and international German companies have a major share in our turnover,” said Dr Stefan Engleder, CEO of the Engel Group, during the opening ceremony. “In the past few years, we have succeeded in increasing our strong position in Germany across all branches of industry. The current trends in the injection- moulding sector also offer us even greater potential for the future on a market that is already very highly developed.”
The driving forces behind technology growth in Germany include lightweight composites, continuing increases in process integration, and Industry 4.0. These trends make manufacturing processes more complex, requiring more and more intensive collaboration between Engel and plastics processors.
“We not only act as suppliers but also increasingly as partners for continuous process optimisation over the entire service life of injection moulding machines and manufacturing cells,” said Vitz. “As a result our aim here at the new subsidiary is to provide even better support to speed up the current and future technological change.”
This is why the technology centre and the training centre were extended and totally refurbished with new equipment. Engel will now present the very latest machines, robots, and technologies at the technology centre and place them at customer disposal for them to carry out their own tests. There is even space for large machines with clamping forces up to 7,000kN.
“One factor that is particularly important for us is that the technology centre should be regarded not merely as a showroom but as an interactive technology centre,” said Vitz. “We invite our customers to experience innovative developments live here and even try them out.”
Two themes are a standard fixture in the new interactive technology centre: inject 4.0 and lightweight construction.
Engel combines all activities linked to Industry 4.0 under the term inject 4.0. Engel sees its role as a partner supporting its customers along the path towards the smart factory. Engel already offers its customers several software products and services for the digitalisation and networking of injection moulding processes. For example, the intelligent assistance systems of iQ weight control and iQ clamp control have become very well established.
During the opening ceremony Engel demonstrated these functionalities on a self-optimising injection moulding machine. All the machines at the technology centre are linked within an intelligent network which even allows automatic load management to avoid expensive energy peaks.
Engel is already an important partner in the development of lightweight construction solutions for large automobile manufacturers, some of whom have their plants in the immediate vicinity of Hannover.