Bäumer presented the first Digital Foam Summit

Digital transformation became an indisputable part of the daily business in the foam industry during the last years. Bäumer invited customers and interested parties to a two-day live stream on this topic and presented various innovations from the industry out of their home base in Freudenberg.

These were the top topics of the Digital Foam Summit (DFS).

"When we push our red button at 6 a.m. in the morning, everything has to work.” This was the requirement that Francisco Pineda, COO of the Spanish Pikolin Group, expressed to Bäumer as a partner in his huge greenfield project. Meaning: Every order has to be correctly assigned to the right machine and all information needs to be integrated into the production planning for that particular day, automatically.

Together with Bäumer’s Sales Director Stephan Hohenadl he talked about the exciting development of this fully automatic solution.
Building the new production facility in Zaragoza, Spain, required 40 truckloads from Freudenberg, six years of planning and two years of implementation. And it was worth it. Pineda reported a state-of-the-art mattress production: "Our fully automated plant intelligently links the long and short block storage with fabrication. We upload all data directly from the in-house ERP."

At a round table the experts also posed the question of the industries sustainability. Is "green" merely a fashionable color, or will our customers sleep on alternative materials instead of polyurethane in 10 years' time? The guests' and audience members' assessment of this question was a tie. Pineda stated: "We really need to think about waste disposal in the future. Where should used mattresses go?" Since these equate to 40 million a year - just in Europe.

Bäumer used the DFS to present news from the long splitting sector: The new “Infinity”, successor to the BSV-E machine, comes all new in a modular design. Depending on customer requirements, the elements of the Comfort and Premium version can be individually combined. The looper machine ensures minimal cutting tolerances and gives the ability to cut very soft materials. "As a machine designer, I was most excited by the new Looper. Very impressive!”, an attendee described.

Owners of machines that are more advanced in their life cycle also got their money’s worth. Stephan Christ, Head of Hotline and Retrofit solutions at Bäumer, presented suitable mechanical and electrical retrofits for almost every machine: "Instead of purchasing a new machine, the existing system is brought up to the latest state-of-the-art. This conserves financial resources and also contributes to the sustainability of production, which means restoring spare parts availability and minimizing machine downtime."

Also newly developed machine features were presented as retrofit options. Such as the automatic grinding unit, that transfers responsibility for the cutting result from the operator to the intelligent program. This is a sustainable improvement of the cut quality, as well as a significant extension of the lifetime of the knife.

Insider tips from foam processing and new solutions from the fields of splitting and sawing: Besides of giving practical advice to customers and operators, the first Digital Foam Summit also provided a glimpse to an exciting future in the foam industry. Bäumer is hoping to see many participants at a second Summit when it’s again time for “Next level foam cutting”.