This year’s winners of the Best of Industry Award were honored June 7 during a gala event at the Vogel Convention Center in Würzburg, Germany. It was the third time that the trade journal MM Maschinenmarkt has bestowed the honor. This year, the journal presented 31 nominated companies in nine categories. Klingelnberg was among the winners, receiving accolades in the ‘Industry 4.0’ category for its cyber-physical production system.
For the third time, the Best of Industry Award honored the best of the best. Solutions that were qualified to vie for the award had won an industry prize between July 1, 2016, and December 31, 2017, or had made an extremely favorable impression on the market. Klingelnberg earned its nomination in late 2016, when the company won the Industry 4.0 Award granted by the trade journal Produktion in collaboration with the consulting firm ROI Management, for which the company had presented its cyber-physical production system. The winners were determined on an equal standing based on the results of an online vote by MM Maschinenmarkt readers and a decision by a nine-member jury of experts. The jury, consisting of MM Maschinenmarkt editors and experts from industry and research, evaluated each nominated product based on the following criteria: technological innovation, benefit for industry, environment and society, and presentation.
“We are delighted to have received this incredible honor,” said Martin Boelter, chief operating officer for production and technology, who accepted the award. “The award is a testament to our company’s success and, of course, our hard work to successfully bring innovative solutions to market.”
Klingelnberg has successfully adapted its 2016 award-winning system for bevel gear production for use with cylindrical gears. Until now, it was not possible in the world of cylindrical gears to obtain a manufacturable flank geometry based on a manufacturing simulation of the gear set. Instead, the flank geometry within the transmission design was based on purely functional aspects. With Klingelnberg’s newly developed Gear Designer simulation software, design engineers have the ability to derive the manufacturable flank geometry from the function-based geometry. Since the manufacturing variance became quantifiable in this way, it also became possible to develop an automatic correction module designed to automatically minimize the manufacturing variance. This innovative closed-loop approach has now given rise to the possibility of a cyber-physical production system for cylindrical gears in which every step in the value chain is described by a digital twin.
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