Citius, altius, fortius. Or in German: Faster, higher, stronger. Pierre de Coubertin proposed this Latin phrase to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) back in 1894. A short time later, it became the motto of the prestigious Summer Olympic Games, can be read again and again on the winners’ medals and is still the motto of competitive sport today. Hekuma GmbH in Hallbergmoos shows just how much competitive sport has to do with industrial production. Competitive sport is perfection. And perfection today requires automatisms more than ever. Automatisms that the company at Munich Airport Business Park makes possible.
The manufacturing industry is similar to competitive sport. Fast and, above all, precise production processes are required for the automated systems to work perfectly. Millions of movement sequences, from infinitesimally small to human-sized gripper arms and simultaneous autonomous monitoring using camera systems, lead to error-free production. “The heart of every system is the control and drive technology,” says Michael Braun, Software Team Leader at Hekuma. Today, more than 5,000 of the company’s systems perform high-performance work worldwide.
It all started very small. In 1974, Richard Herbst founded Hekuma GmbH to meet the constantly growing demand for automatic insertion and removal units for the plastics industry. The name of the company was derived from this: Hekuma still stands for “Herbst Kunststoff Maschinen” today.
In addition to medical and automotive technology, the product range also supplies the consumer goods industry. The high-performance machines are in demand around the globe. In an age in which the machine capture and processing of information in just a few fractions of a second has become standard, the company is helping to drive the fourth generation industry forward profitably with efficient solutions. Always in the foreground: performance. But with one crucial difference to sport: while machines run at full speed day in, day out, no athlete in the world can achieve this performance 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As a subsidiary of the German mechanical engineering company Elexis Group, Hekuma GmbH operates primarily in the plastics sector. Hekuma focuses on the automation of injection molding systems and can now draw on 44 years of experience in this field. The company employs more than 150 people and only this year relocated its headquarters to the Munich Airport Business Park in Hallbergmoos, which now covers more than 15,500 square meters, not least because of the optimal connections to customers from all over the world.
Images © Municipality of Hallbergmoos
