The vision is clear: "We want every injection moulder to use our e-connect portal as their default start page one day and we want them to find everything they need for their day-to-day production," as Gerhard Dimmler, CTO of the ENGEL Group, explains. ENGEL is deriving its inject 4.0 strategy from this vision. Already introduced at the K show 2022, the strategy envisages expanding the previous customer portal to provide a production portal. The production portal will then be compatible with all manufacturers, giving injection moulders the ability to map all the value-added stages of their production on the portal.
TIG know-how integrated into the existing ENGEL structure
ENGEL acquired software vendor TIG, which developed the authentig MES solution, among other products, back in 2016. Some years later, the distribution of authentig was brought into the ENGEL fold and assigned to the Digital Sales department, headed by Hannes Zach. En route to becoming a one-stop shop for digital solutions, the injection moulding machine manufacturer is now fully integrating TIG know-how into its existing structures. The company will be merged into the ENGEL Group on 1 January 2024. ENGEL will take over all the employees, and the headquarters in Rankweil, Vorarlberg, Austria, will also be retained. Hannes Pils, previously the company's CEO now has the role of Head of Service & Consulting in ENGEL Customer Service.
ENGEL sim link data interface extended to include MOLDEX3D
ENGEL is also presenting another innovation for the design phase at Fakuma – the first of the four phases along the injection moulding process.
sim link, a solution from the inject 4.0 family for a bidirectional exchange of data between the simulation and the injection moulding machine, is being expanded and is now also compatible with MOLDEX3D. In product development, the question of the manufacturability of a part is key. Simulation delivers the answer for the injection moulding processes here. Despite this, a survey shows that many injection moulders fail to integrate the expertise from simulation into production and, conversely, that actual parameters from production rarely find their way back into the simulation either. The result is time-consuming and cost-intensive iteration loops to optimise the mould and the production process. At the Expert Corner Design of the ENGEL stand at Fakuma, ENGEL is showing how the ENGEL sim link data interface accelerates sample inspection of injection moulds and pushes the optimisation of injection moulding processes forward, resulting in significant productivity gains.
