Another fact that you have emphasised at the Symposium is that all your innovations are driven by the single objective of making your customers more successful. Can you share a couple of examples in this regard?

I can't go really deep into this topic because our relationships with our customers and the solutions for them are not public and confidential. I can share some general examples though.

The new CrankGrind from Schaudt was driven exactly from the customer purpose. We had to learn a lot about the processes in the automotive industry for producing crank shafts. Here one concrete example is the way you can change the wheel. With our new CrankGrind it is e.g. really easy to change the grinding wheel without climbing up the machine.

Another example is the smallest grinding machine in the market: the Studer S11 with a footprint of only 1.6 sq m. This allows customers to save space for production - but without losing quality and performance.

Going ahead, where do you see the big potential for innovation in Grinding?

Again, we're not thinking only about technical innovation. Big innovation field we see apart from the machine in know-how and training and even for the software and machine control. For example, we are investing every year a lot in our Service Academy and in PuLs. We really believe that we can only sell the best products and services if we will set the benchmark in our internal processes and we will invest in our employees. Finally you have more than one dimension for being innovative: on the product and service side, on the process side, and even on the design side.