OptiSense: "You have to be visionary every day"
Interview with OptiSense Managing Director Dr Jens Heymans on the company's 25th anniversary
To mark the anniversary, Managing Director Dr. Jens Heymans briefly reviews the history of the company and provides an insight into the topics and technologies that OptiSense and its customers are currently working on.
In your opinion, what were the decisive steps 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 proactive support service that ensures the smooth and safe operation of coating thickness measurement systems.
Predictive maintenance is an important aspect of the suite. Predictive maintenance provides reliable measured values as a database for evaluation systems. This enables customers to save costs and increase planning efficiency by optimizing maintenance intervals.
25 years of OpiSense - what is your recipe for success?
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. We have a good 85 percent existing customers. The same applies to our team. Many of our colleagues have been with us for a long time.
How have the requirements changed in recent years?
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.
Has this also had an impact on the team and the way they work?
Looking back, we can say that the commitment of our employees has made us stronger as a company. Over the last three years, we have grown by an average of 26 percent.
Which future topics are most relevant for OptiSense and your customers?
In my view, the continuous increase in efficiency through automation will occupy us intensively. Increasingly higher speeds and precision in the line will also demand specifications from 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.
IIoT will certainly also increasingly influence the coating industry. The networking of sensors, products and machines as well as the evaluation of the collected data will open up new possibilities.
How will you celebrate your anniversary?
To celebrate our 25th birthday, we are launching a strictly limited product design on the market. This underlines the premium concept of our brand. We are emphasizing the special look of our "PaintChecker Mobile 25 Years" with a very special, polished surface finish.
What do you and your team wish for the future?
I would like our entire team to remain as motivated as ever! For the future, I wish myself and my team a lot of interest in new things and, of course, exciting projects and great customers. If it's fun and everyone is enthusiastic, OptiSense will continue to be on the right track.