Stefanie Flaeper, Managing Director at transfluid

Q1: As the transition to Industry 4.0 picks up speed, how do you see the future of the metalworking industry? What are your views on challenges and trends facing the metalworking industry?

Anyone who considers the changes with some foresight is on a good path to a positive future. High-tech for effective pipe processing is the key to progress for many technologies and an important solution driver in all area of daily work and life, for example, when you consider machine and medical technology. Over the course of digital development, we also discovered completely new solutions, which ensure even more efficiency in heavily connected processes. Like I said, anyone who’s forward-thinking and is ready to approach digitalisation challenges and the accompanying shift in thinking openly will be successful. The demand will continue to grow together with increasing productivity. We’re already witnessing this development, for example, with our individual automation systems t motion and our tube bending software t control.

The relevance of highly rigid materials in lightweight construction continues to increase. In the automobile area, the trend is developing towards low quantities together with flexible automatic production, i.e. small quantities and individual pieces in automatic processes. This results in advantages like employee-independent production, process reliability, and influence on traceable processes, for example module assembly. Overall, there’s more planning reliability. Of course, the potential for mechanical engineering is being defined worldwide by automation and digitalisation. I see the clearest opportunities and chance to grow in this area. We’re expanding these trends ourselves with our own innovative power.

-- Stefanie Flaeper, Managing Director at transfluid