Hirschmann Automotive established its plant in Nantong, China in 2013 to house its production, R&D and sales. Its customers include a large number of international and local well-known automotive OEM manufacturers. “Now, Hirschmann has 360 employees in Nantong. We have achieved decent growth in recent years on the employee side and in our business as well,” Mr. Arsenic said.

In HV (High Voltage) business, customers expect high flexibility with maximum product safety. “In 2008, we developed the first generation of high-voltage connector product for the electric vehicle market. For more than 10 years, the company has been working rapidly on the further development of its high-voltage portfolio. Now, we are developing and producing the second generation of high-voltage connectors. At the same time, we started investing in the areas of digitization and automation,” Mr. Arsenic added.

For a company like Hirschmann that operates in a very agile business environment, it is important to have flexible suppliers, such as motan, on its side that is able to create customized solutions in the same way Hirschmann customizes solutions for its customers.

“Especially HV (High Voltage) connectors and cables which need new processing technologies that cannot be transferred simply 1:1 from LV (low voltage) connectors and cables”, Mr. Ringel, Technical Supervisor of Hirschmann, said. “For this, a strong and experienced development is mandatory to keep the project timelines.”

For Hirschmann, it is important to ensure the high stability and reliable production process for safety parts like connectors and cables. motan with its broad product portfolio provides many solutions that meet Hirschmann’s requirements. 

Globally, Hirschmann has in each plant a motan central drying and conveying system in use with mainly two LUXOR A dry air generators that work in parallel (reliability). Due to each local requirement, different number, and volumes of silos. “They are connected with hundreds of METRO Gs. Finally, all of these are controlled via the CONTROLnet system,” Mr. Ringel said.

There is also a separate “motan room” in Hirschmann Nantong plant, which incorporates a complete set of dosing and mixing, drying and conveying system from GRAVICOLORs to METRO G, LUXOR A and conveying pipes, with its unique industrial blue. The system consists of four LUXOR A dry air generators that provide 50 to 400 liters of dry air for eight LUXOR bin A silos.

“motan’s central drying and conveying system brings process stability, perfectly avoiding the risk of material contamination and reducing the risk of humidity fluctuations. More importantly, we could avoid material errors,”

Mr. Ringel explained. “The piping system is used to convey materials to silos. In the past, we used the coupling table system to allow operators to flexibly choose materials manually. However, this system has a risk that materials may be incorrectly selected during operation and conveyed to the machine for incorrect mixing. motan provides us with RFID coupling tables to avoid wrong materials conveyed to machines and reduce human error.”

With the continuous expansion of production scale, Hirschmann is facing new challenges. “We have to continuously increase the number of silos and improve further material handling capabilities. However, how many units to be added and how to control them more intelligently is a difficult task. motan supports us a lot, they help us calculate the number of silos, choose the most suitable specification and unit, etc. Especially its CONTROLnet product allows us to control the drying and conveying systems in one monitoring system,” Mr. Ringel said.

“motan is for us a reliable partner with high flexibility and is open to our ideas and improvements, especially in discontinuous material drying with various consumption quantities and flexible material handling, we see potentials for the future. This is, what our customers expect and what we are willed to fulfil,”

Mr. Ringel added.