A last-minute decision to attend the opening of GE Additive’s Lichtenfels Campus meant my route was circuitous and my time to prepare for interviews limited. Arriving at my hotel I was trying to figure out the last time I was in town visiting the company GE acquired as part of a 1.5 billion USD deal, Concept Laser. Through the powers of Google Photos, I realised that it was, in fact, five years ago to the day since I took part in Concept’s 2014 user group.
In many ways a lot has changed in half a decade; gone is the Concept Laser orange colour scheme, in is GE Additive’s blue and white, the workforce is four times larger and the new facility has that smart factory, Industry 4.0 feel you tend only to get from multinationals. What hasn’t changed is the team-spirit that Concept Laser Founder and CEO Frank Herzog instilled with his commitment to the code of honour that is the Deutsche Mittelstand.
“Behind the companies there are owners and we have a responsibility to take care of the people,” Frank Herzog told me five years ago. “The people that work for us, who we have a responsibility to as a long-term employer; being a reliable partner the people that are our customers; and the people in our local surrounding, who we support by the sponsorship of social and sporting activities. We are a community.”
After working to bring the metal additive manufacturing technology to market for the best part of two decades, Frank and his wife Kerstin undoubtedly made a great deal of money in the deal with GE. One would forgive the pair for jetting off to a tropical paradise, but such is Frank’s dedication to additive manufacturing in Bavaria, he has overseen the integration between the two companies at the Lichtenfels site and GE Additive’s CEO Jason Oliver called the new campus ‘Frank’s Vision’.
GE Additive team cuts ribbon on new campus.
“Mohammad Ehteshami [the VP of additive integration at GE at the time of acquisition] asked me really to make a plan for how we want to ramp up here in Lichtenfels,” Frank said at the grand-opening. “The result is this campus here, it hits the numbers of machines we need to produce, and it has the flexibility to shape what we do in the future.”
The new 40,000 square metre facility will replace what is currently 26 different buildings all with different functionalities. The campus’s singularity is, for a man so focussed on community, the most important feature.
“We’re a family,” says Frank. “You’re only working when you’re together, when you’re sitting together on a table in the evening [having] dinner together, it’s the same here, for efficient working and collaborating, I think you need to be together. The character of this building is like a university campus; we have open offices, we have silent working areas, we have meeting areas to exchange ideas, we have a nice canteen; people have the chance again to work closely together and to create. Concept Laser had its own culture and this will change. The new culture will be a mixture of GE and Concept Laser culture, Arcam will add colour to this culture, it’s the GE Additive culture.”
There isn’t anybody more embracing of the new culture than GE Additive CEO Jason Oliver. Jason delivered a speech to the gathered employees and dignitaries in wordperfect German.
“This campus represents a commitment to Lichtenfels,” extolls Jason. “A commitment to Bavaria, a commitment to Germany, and a commitment to Frank and the people that have built Concept Laser. An investment in the campus of 150 million euros tells you that we are committed to the industry, we know about where the growth is going to come from, and we have real plans to achieve that. In the future, there will be plenty of hiring and more machines coming out the door.”
GE Additive
Jason Oliver, President & CEO of GE Additive, with Concept Laser founders Kerstin and Frank Herzog.
I was given a tour of the facility by GE Additive’s Andrew Simpson, Pascal Krause and Wolfgang Lauer, all of whom have been involved in the new facility from the ground up. For those that have worked in the other Lichtenfels facility, there is more to being under one roof than ideas of culture and future, there’s a much more practical benefit.
“Do you need to ask somebody a question?” asks Pascal. “Now, instead of having to run three kilometres,”
“In the rain and the snow,” Wolfgang interjects.
“Now it’s only 200 metres.”
The production of the M2, M Line, X Line and Mlab machines will ultimately move in its entirety to these two long bright and airy corridors. The facility houses shipping and receiving areas, it has a warehouse facility, it has a walled off R&D lab where the team will work on the next generation of machines, and the entire front side of the building facing the autobahn will be dedicated office space for the admin, accounts and customer service teams.
The building itself looks every bit as good as those renders you see of factories of the future in presentations. It has the flexibility to add automation to the production/ assembly process and Jason Oliver is keen that the facility echoes the technology GE Additive is going to produce:
“Automation is absolutely key. If you look at our latest product line that we will manufacture here in this facility, the M Line, that has a lot of automation already built in, where you’re now not touching powder at all. It’s highly efficient and we’ll have whole factories based on that kind of concept, where you have full production lines connected.”
Although Jason has the vision for the future, coming from the world of 2D printing where speed and reliability is king, Jason is all too aware that those are the two areas metal additive manufacturing needs to address now. The GE Additive Campus and team here in Lichtenfels certainly seems like it has the wherewithal to do so.
