Dr. Jens Heymans, Managing Director of coating thickness measurement expert OptiSense, Interview: Birgit Hostmann
25 years of OpiSense, a quarter of a century has passed. What is the OptiSense recipe for success?
In addition to our numerous innovations, what sets us apart is our ability to deal flexibly with new technical requirements. Our recipe for success is: you have to be visionary every day! Another success factor is our long-standing customer relationships. OptiSense has a good 85% existing customers who we have accompanied on their journey for many years.
In your opinion, what have been the decisive innovations and most formative moments of the last 25 years?
Oh, there are a whole series of milestones: Starting with the foundation as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Optics Center in 1998. Just one year later, we developed the first photothermal coating thickness sensor for a robotic industrial application. Shortly afterwards, the first major car manufacturers such as Audi came to us as customers. The patented PaintChecker Mobile LED handheld measuring device then went into series production. In 2016, we entered the Chinese automotive market. Two years later, we developed our industrial controller, which measures the coating thickness at up to eight points simultaneously. In 2020, we launched our service suite - a comprehensive, cost-effective and proactive support service that ensures the smooth and safe operation of coating thickness measurement systems. An important aspect of the suite is predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance provides reliable measured values as a database for evaluation systems. This enables customers to save costs through optimized maintenance intervals and increase efficiency in planning.
"You have to be visionary every day!"
How have the requirements changed?
If you work for global players and hidden champions, you can't let up and you have to think ahead. Accordingly, we reacted early on to the requirements and wishes relating to automation and miniaturization. Our sensors now fit into any production environment, no matter how cramped. A large percentage of quality controls are now fast, automated inline measurements. And for this, it is more important than ever to develop correspondingly powerful measuring systems.
What future topics are important for OptiSense?
In my view, we will be working intensively on continuously increasing efficiency through automation. Increasingly higher speeds and precision in the line will also demand specifications from the sensors in the future that are many times more demanding in order to measure coating thicknesses even faster in motion or to inspect extremely thin coatings. We will continue to focus on topics such as analytics, platforms and IIoT: Analytics, i.e. data analysis, now counts as the foundation of modern management and is one of the most important skills for managing a coating company profitably. However, only a fraction of companies fully evaluate the data they collect. Yet it is precisely the know-how of the analyzed correlations that can provide important information for an optimal and truly smooth coating process.
How will you be celebrating your anniversary?
For our 25th anniversary, we are launching a strictly limited product design on the market. With the limited edition, we are emphasizing the premium concept of our brand down to the smallest detail. We are emphasizing the special look of our "PaintChecker Mobile 25 Years" with a very special, polished surface finish.
INFO
Dr. Jens Heymans is the Managing Director of OptiSense. The manufacturer of coating thickness gauges from Haltern am See, a town of 37,000 inhabitants in the north of North Rhine-Westphalia, has experienced a growth boom with average growth of 26% over the last three years.
