Better Than Gold

15 years have passed since the senior partner of Haager GmbH & Co. KG came back from a trade fair with a new idea; instead of only manufacturing jewelry as in the past, the company should orient itself towards the medical technology industry. This is because the German jewelry industry, which was mainly based in the "Golden City" of Pforzheim, had been through and was facing difficult times. Haager took on small projects for individual medical technology manufacturers to begin with, in order to develop the requisite know-how for the new area. "It goes without saying that the requirements with respect to the precision and surface quality are considerably higher in medical technology than in the jewelry industry. But the basic requisites for accomplishing this were definitely available”, says Stephan Lehnert, quality assurer at Haager. The reactions of the customers to the quality of the products encouraged the present senior partner to invest progressively in more precise machinery and to expand the production space. A high investment which has paid off says Lehnert: The medium-sized company can now also guarantee tolerance specifications of a few microns and "our production area will soon be exhausted as a result of the revenue growth". The high quality of the Haager products is also supported by end-to-end machine data recording. "We record everything which is currently possible from machine data to quality data and generate information from this which optimizes our processes and our quality”, explains Lehnert.

The 35-employee company has put its faith in the currently heavily hyped formula for success of end-to-end data acquisition for the last six years. The successes are already perceptible: The set-up time and therefore the downtime of the machines has been optimized. And the statistical evaluation of the quality data means that "we can now also recognize earlier whether the processes are running stably and which points we have to optimize". In the opinion of the quality manager, the permanent and pro-active self-optimization separates the wheat from the chaff in the last analysis. Because he knows one thing for sure: In future, medical technology manufacturers will wish to integrate the parts from their suppliers in their products without inspection for time and cost reasons. And suppliers who do not define the so-called zero defect strategy as a specific goal will be very quickly on the outside looking in – permanently. Lehnert can understand this: for example, a metal part for endoscopy manufactured in Pforzheim is provided with a lens and a chip in Japan. If the metal part for 17 euros from Pforzheim does not comply with the promised quality, the manufacturer throws more than 3,000 euros away according to Lehnert. Added to this is the damage to the reputation of the suppliers of the medical devices, especially if patients suffer harm. The employees of Haager GmbH therefore give top priority to the issue of quality and put their faith in a ZEISS O-INSPECT for high-precision measurement of the tolerances for shape and position.