We also had a strong program management that was very effective in coordinating all these different departments to achieve one goal, and in turning an extensive portfolio of individual highly innovative development projects into this marketable product. It was only because of this manpower, and because everyone at TRUMPF was fully behind the project, that we were able to turn our ambitious plans into reality. Ottnad: The TruLaser Center 7030 core team is made up of more than 100 employees from the service, sales, product group, development, purchasing, production and project organization departments. The development team’s creativity was directed at a shared goal, resulting in the success you see here. That said, we needed to have geniuses on the team – otherwise we never would never have achieved our goal. Jens Ottnad: It’s fair to say that team effort won out over the lone genius approach of the past. Our firm goal for this was to achieve savings of 15-30 percent in machining costs for our customers, and every solution had to be measured against this goal. And even more importantly, it enabled us to define, in the design phase, the permitted costs of the solution and its performance in the part program. This standard made it possible, for the first time, to model the existing technology and to evaluate new ideas from our customers’ real production perspective. The result was a representative production program – the “original standard” by which we measured productivity, production problems and the impact of those problems. Customers from a variety of industries helped us with this by providing several hundred set-up plans, which we then analyzed statistically based on a variety of relevant parameters. To that end, we developed standard sheet layouts that model the range of parts our customers use. Riesenhuber: We had to make productivity measurable, and we had to do it using real parts under real production conditions. Riesenhuber: We also formulated clear efficiency and process reliability targets for the machine, and used these to assess each development stage. It was the first time we had applied agile methods across the board in a mechatronics project. The novel aspect was that all specialist departments worked in parallel and agreed on things among themselves in very short intervals. But to achieve overall success we needed lots more ideas, and these had to specifically tackle the problems we were facing. Of course, it was a brilliant idea that sparked this radical new development. In other words, you not only developed something new, but you did it in a new way?Įpperlein: Exactly. That’s why we fundamentally shifted our perspective – away from current machine design and toward an unobstructed view of our customers’ Peter Epperlein: We knew going into it that we would have to question existing development methods if we wanted to achieve a true leap in innovation with this mature technology.

The initial idea for the TruLaser Center 7030 emerged in 2012, and the project was officially approved in 2014.

How and when did the TruLaser Center 7030 project come about?įelix Riesenhuber: TRUMPF had long wanted to develop the next generation of laser-cutting machines. In an interview, they spoke with us about the highs and lows of the past few years and told us what it takes to develop such a novel product. Felix Riesenhuber, Peter Epperlein and Jens Ottnad were heavily involved in designing, developing and implementing the new TruLaser Center 7030.

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