Industrial Vehicle Technology - June 2020
A DAZZLING DISPLAY
2020-07-10 05:02:41
CUSTOMISED DISPLAY SOLUTIONS ARE PRODUCED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE TECHNOLOGICAL AND DESIGN REQUIREMENTS OF OEMs
Topcon broke its own record a month before the end of the financial year, with its 100,000th display to leave the company inside 12 months, a doubling of output in just four years. “In the early 1990s, hardly anyone could imagine what monitors in tractors could be used for,” says Thilo Nagel, general manager at Topcon Electronics. “Today they are an important interface for operating increasingly complex machines.”
A rich history
Topcon Electronics, formerly known as Wachendorff Elektronik, has been part of the Topcon Positioning Group since 2014. However, the proximity to technological solutions for the agriculture industry has been apparent in the formerly medium-sized company since 1995.
“Fendt had such a crazy idea of a display that should be installed in a tractor,” says Nagel. “Up to this point, such displays were only known in the industrial sector. But this had to be mobile and to withstand shocks and temperature fluctuations. Also the driver had to be able to hold onto it when climbing on the tractor and his eight-year-old grandson, who would sometimes join his grandfather, had to also be able to sit on it without breaking it”.
The innovative manufacturer from Geisenheim in Germany solved the tricky task, and the first fully functional and equally robust display for a processing machine was born. Word about the new Topcon displays spread around among the OEMs. Today Topcon Electronics produces displays for machine manufacturers from all over the world.
Recipe for success
According to Nagel, Topcon Electronics’ success is due to the fact that, “our displays are a blank page, so to speak, a component that we design and produce in accordance with the technological and design requirements of the machine manufacturer.” OEMs install their own software on Topcon’s displays and thus offer their customers an individual graphic interface for operating the machine. “Our core competence is to provide a freely programmable system to manufacturers for everything that has wheels and chains, and is typically not intended for passenger transportation.”
Each display that leaves the production facility in Geisenheim is individually tailored to the customer’s needs – something hard to achieve for competitors who use serial production for large quantities. Since 2011, Topcon has been systematically developing a programme in which modularity is the magic word – giving a multitude of different displays that can be traced back to just 20 product families.
The same yet different
“In the OPUS family alone there are 65 different solutions,” says Nagel. All displays in a family have the same technological core. However, the display size, outer shape, colour, processor, operating system, number of buttons and ultimately the brand of the manufacturers, differ. “We solve everything that is technically solvable”.
These customised components are usually being delivered directly to the OEM’s production line in fixed periods and mostly two-digit batch sizes. “This is a huge responsibility for us because our display production must run in line with the machine production process,” says Mathias Kühn, director operations Europe.
Author: Karen Dörflinger, consultant, Topcon
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A DAZZLING DISPLAY
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