Q: Durr has been building vehicle paint lines for decades. Why do your customers suddenly want you to offer a new level of predictive data evaluation?
Ostin: Part of it was that our customers want to run their plants 24 hours a day right now. But that’s not really realistic, because they have to take some time to maintain the machines. So, if they know what’s going to fail ahead of time, they can keep their plants up and running longer, instead of letting something fail.
Weiten: Another key factor is that everyone wants to be part of digitalization now. Durr looked into it to decide what services we might offer. We knew we had a lot of data in the plant to provide the customer.
Ostin: Durr was part of the original Industry 4.0 push a few years ago. We’ve tried to develop products on an ongoing basis to support that. Through a digital-twin approach, we can do offline programming for the paint processes and then enable first run at 100 percent quality.
