IDS expands production facilities

27 Jan 2009

For the second time in just three years, the German camera manufacturer IDS (Imaging Development Systems) has expanded its facilities to create more space for offices, production and logistics. The representative new building at the company headquarters in Obersulm, Germany, was opened at the end of 2008, after an impressively short construction period. The central feature of the new building is a future-oriented production system focused on efficiency and flexibility.

The new building opens a new chapter in the company's success story, which started out in 1997 with the development and distribution of frame grabbers. In 2004, IDS added the uEye series of industrial cameras to the product portfolio. Meanwhile several tens of thousands of IDS cameras are in use worldwide in industrial automation, quality assurance, security technology, and non-industrial applications. The uEye series today comprises models with USB or GigE interface, plastic or metal housing, CCD or CMOS sensor, and resolutions from VGA to 5 megapixels.

IDS has recently launched a new addition to the uEye® series: the GigE uEye SE. Like all cameras from IDS, this compact GigE camera is particularly easy to integrate either using the supplied SDK or through standard interfaces such as GenICam. The new SE line was specially tailored to the needs of plant and machinery manufacturers.

With the launch of the Gigabit uEye SE, IDS introduced a new compact solution in the GigE camera segment at the VISION 2008.

IDS has a staff of about 80 employees in the development, production, sales, marketing and support departments at its head office in Obersulm, Germany. The new building with the striking glass facade houses the modern, spacious office and training rooms.

The central feature of the building is the future-oriented production system in the now 900 sq.m. large production and logistics area. Designed to make the manufacture significantly more flexible and efficient, the system has already increased the production of uEye® cameras by 30% within only a few weeks. "With the new manufacturing cells, we can quickly scale our capacities according to demand," says Achim Terhoeven, Technical Production Manager at IDS in Obersulm. "The warehouse located at the center is the core of the production shop floor. The entire material flow takes place on a single level around the warehouse along the shortest possible paths." A state-of-the-art paternoster system interfaces the warehouse to the production. The paternoster receives the orders from the production planning software and automatically makes the required components available for processing.

The advantages, according to Terhoeven, also include a clearly structured material flow that is easy to monitor. "The individual workstations are designed so that there is no material accumulation. This makes bottlenecks easy to identify and fix."

The requirements specification for the new building stipulated not only a high-performance production system and a pleasant office environment. When planning the building, a further key focus of managing director Jürgen Hartmann was on environmental protection and energy efficiency: "The photovoltaic panels installed on the roof of the production plant can supply the average annual power needed for the building's CO2-neutral geothermal heating system and the air conditioning."

IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH
Herr Thomas Schmidgall
Dimbacher Str. 6-8
74182 Obersulm
Germany

Phone: +49 (0) 7134 / 961 96 - 0
Fax: +49 (0) 7134 / 961 96 - 99

eMail: t.schmidgall@ids-imaging.de
Web: www.ids-imaging.de