DMG Mori and Festo can look back on over 20 years of partnership. In 2017, Festo was named a Preferred Partner by DMG Mori. This has now been followed by the presentation of the DMG Mori Innovation Award 2019 to Festo. This award underlines the trusting relationship and the close and successful development partnership between the two companies.

"At DMG Mori, we particularly appreciate how intensively Festo's automation experts have contributed to the joint developments. Both digitalization and automation are the key elements of future-oriented production. Together, we are accelerating this change," explained Christian Thönes, CEO of DMG Mori AG.

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. h.c. Oliver Jung, Chairman of the Management Board of Festo AG, added: "We have been working together with DMG Mori for over 20 years. As technology leaders in their respective industries, DMG Mori and Festo use each other's expertise to offer their customers significant added value. Together with DMG Mori, we have developed attractive customer-specific products and also achieved considerable efficiency and productivity gains through innovative process optimizations."

Joint development of a valve plate

A prime example of this was the cooperation between the engineers of both companies in the development of a valve plate to control the pneumatic units of the Lasertec SLM machines. Together, specialists from both companies tested adaptations of available valve technology and, following successful tests, introduced them as the new standard in the Lasertec SLM machines. "In this project, we combined factory and process automation components and provided the associated software module for the machine control system," said Dietfried Lustig, Global Key Account Manager at Festo.

The two companies are also successfully working together to introduce new systems for innovative business processes: for example, they both use the Itonics innovation platform. This enables suppliers and machine developers to exchange new development proposals directly or pick up ideas from machine designers that can lead to significant process improvements and therefore savings.