think together

04/16/2019

SGL Carbon has been supplying its partners with high-tech materials for a long time. Now the company wants to bring its cooperations to the next level and involve customers even more systematically in the development of new innovations. Join us on an expedition to a few of today’s and tomorrow’s pioneers of this new strategic approach.

When Andreas Wöginger talks about his work, he speaks a long time about trust, openness and respect. About how important it is to listen to customers, to understand their problems from their point of view and then to find solutions by working together. “Customers are learning how to work with these relatively new composite materials,” says the mechanical engineer. Behind him, a robotic arm is placing a carbon fiber mat into a machine press.

Wöginger is responsible for technology development within the business unit Composites – Fibers & Materials (CFM) at SGL Carbon. In his 2,000-square-meter lab, he and his colleagues are testing the newest production methods. SGL offers services along all steps of the value chain, from design services to development and implementation of the finished component.

Sometimes customers come without any prior knowledge in the field of composites and they work together with the SGL team to develop a completely new component. Sometimes it is about supporting a more experienced customer to advance development of lightweight components for mass production. Yet regardless of whether it’s a new design or an adaptation of a current one: “Cooperation between customers and SGL is becoming increasingly important,” explains Christoph Ebel, who is a member of Wöginger’s team and leads SGL’s in-house Lightweight and Application Center (LAC).

Cooperation is Crucial

What is true for lightweight construction can also be applied to all industries of SGL Carbon. From the battery sector to the LED and semiconductor industries to the chemical industry: cooperation with customers is more important than ever before. SGL Carbon has made the credo of partnerships the focus of its new corporate strategy and corporate culture. “In addition to continue to manufacture high-quality and functional materials, we will also develop smart solutions together with our customers,” says SGL Carbon CEO Jürgen Köhler.

There are good reasons for the strategic realignment. All over the world, manufacturers, customers and their suppliers are working even more closely together to develop new products, applications and solutions. The days when engineers and designers spent years tinkering in laboratories and studios and then presenting customers with a finished product are over. The package and mail logistics company DHL, for example, has been bringing its customers and partners together in innovation centers for some time now. This led, for example, to the idea of the Parcelcopter — an autonomous flying packagedelivery drone. Software companies such as SAP and the food-products multinational Danone are using platforms to involve their customers in developing their products.

We have two ears and one mouth — and that’s how we should behave

Christoph Henseler, GMS Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales

“Collaborating with external partners is crucial for the success of innovative projects,” says Krsto Pandza, an innovation researcher at Leeds University Business School. He’s been dealing with this topic for years. To date, B2C companies in particular have relied on close cooperation with customers and partners since the hurdles to cooperation are lower and the successes more quickly apparent. In the B2B sector, in contrast, many companies still remain in traditional contractual agreements, which have proved their worth but aren’t terribly likely to promote innovation. Marie Taillard and Jerome Couturier of the ESCP Europe Business School consider this a mistake. The advantages can be just as tempting in the B2B sector, they argue in an analysis. „But they require the foresight to see beyond traditional corporate boundaries, and the audacity to share with those you naturally want to keep at a distance.”

A Tradition of Close Collaboration

SGL Carbon has a tradition of cooperating with partners. For instance, the Graphite Materials & Systems (GMS) division has long relied on Technical Sales Managers. They remain in close contact with customers and develop customized solutions based on the customers’ requirements. “This is how we combine our strengths with our customers’ needs,” says GMS Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Christoph Henseler. In this way, Henseler and his team have learned, for example, that a mixture of modular solutions and corresponding adaptations are optimal for their customers in the area of heat exchangers, while in the semiconductor industry or the battery segment almost every customer has individual requirements. Henseler’s motto: “We have two ears and one mouth — and that’s how we should behave.”

For SGL’s composites division, the topic of partnership is also nothing  new. Cooperations have often even taken the form of joint ventures. SGL Carbon’s long-standing joint venture with BMW has really left its mark in this respect. In joint pioneering work, the two partners realized the BMW i3—the first complete massproducible car passenger compartment made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics — and advanced the material’s utilization for other BMW models. They also established the two facilities in Moses Lake, Washington (US) and Wackersdorf, Germany, being the world’s most state-of-the-art carbon fiber production and a highly innovative fiber processing facility.

The collaborative approach has grown increasingly stronger throughout SGL Carbon. The result: numerous projects are already proving that cooperation is worthwhile wherever it occurs.

An expedition in five chapters

Volvo Cars & SGL Carbon: From Scratch Together

Per year, 500,000 leaf springs made of glass fiber-reinforced composite come off the fully automated assembly lines in the SGL facility in Ort, Austria. They’ll end up being installed in the rear axle of all Volvo 60 and 90 models. The serial production of this high-tech component demonstrates what can result when two partners work closely together: a part that is 65 percent lighter than conventional steel leaf springs.

Erik Johansson, Senior Design Engineer at Volvo Cars, is instrumental in the design, implementation and development of the Volvo Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) platform and its leaf spring project. He can vividly recall how the cooperation with SGL Carbon and Benteler, the joint venture partner at the time, started six years ago. “We always wanted to design the leaf spring for our new SPA platform based on composite material,” Johansson explains, “and after the request for proposals, we quickly decided to go with SGL.” Once the contract was signed, the joint cooperation started immediately: weekly telephone conferences, reciprocal visits between Gothenburg (Sweden), Ried (Austria) as well as at a test facility in the Netherlands, and always new meetings to plan the next steps.

“The crucial point for such a development is that we must bring together all the capabilities, from component design, prototype development and validation to series process design. In this case, we were able to demonstrate this very well.” says Robert Hütter, Director Sales and Program Management Automotive for SGL Carbon in Austria. At the same time, it wasn’t easy to adapt Volvo Cars’ original design to serial production processes. “There were long, always constructive, discussions about it,” Hütter recalls. “But, in the end, together we found a way where we could fulfil all requirements from Volvo Cars and are able to produce in a stable high-volume process.”

Lines of communication were open from the very beginning

Johansson was also impressed by how the partners were able to pull together despite the project’s many hurdles. “The lines of communication were open and clear from the very beginning, and everyone was open to ideas and solutions from the other side,” he says. One of the major contributing factors to the success of this project was SGL Carbon’s expertise in production processes, not to mention in research and development.

The new leaf spring is helping Volvo Cars build lighter and more compact rear axles. “Not only that,” Johansson adds, “but the new leaf spring gives us a lot of flexibility because we can use the same variant in many models, meaning we don’t have to redesign it every time.” Johansson, Hütter and their teams are already working on the next generation of the leaf spring and the associated manufacturing facilities.

Pierburg & SGL Carbon: Cleared All the Hurdles Together

A customer inquiry, two components and a couple of technical drawings—these marked the start of the cooperation between Pierburg, owned by Rheinmetall Automotive AG, and SGL Carbon. Eight years later it has resulted in a true partnership. Working continuously together, the two companies have advanced development of the EVP 40, a vacuum pump to increase braking power—and both companies have benefited from this long-term process. Pierburg appreciates the robustness of SGL Carbon’s graphite. Thanks to its good friction properties and temperature resistance, the pump no longer requires oil lubrication and lasts much longer. In turn, the SGL Carbon team used Pierburg’s inquiry and demand for products to further expand its production of graphite components for the automotive industry.

Mutual Interest and Respect

Adi Woizenko has been monitoring the development work for SGL Carbon at the Bonn site for the past three years. This was the transition phase from the project to mass production and now the current ramp-up to full production. The key to the partnership’s success has been mutual interest, respect and a shared fascination for technology. “In all these years it’s like we’ve been hitting the Ping-Pong balls right back to each other,” he recalls. Naturally it wasn’t all smooth sailing, like when it came to converting production to a fully automatic grinding process. “In the end, though, it was precisely at these points that it became apparent that we stood together, even during difficult phases,” Woizenko says.

Today all the effort continues to pay off. “The SGL components have always been a safe bet for us, although they are the two most complicated components in the pump,” says Nabil Al-Hasan at Pierburg. “You can see how helpful it was that SGL Carbon had been working on mass production for such a very long time.” For Al-Hasan, the good experiences are the foundation for further cooperation. “We are currently in the process of developing larger pumps—and we will continue to rely on SGL Carbon for them.”

Joint Venture Brembo & SGL Carbon: Setting Completely New Standards

Sometimes two partners find each other at just the right moment, and that was exactly the situation in which SGL Carbon and the Italian brake manufacturer Brembo found themselves in 2009. Both companies had been developing carbon ceramic brake discs—which are 50 percent lighter than traditional brake discs and almost as hard as diamonds—for more than ten years independently of one another. But then it was time to join forces, and the two companies founded the joint venture Brembo SGL Carbon Ceramic Brakes (BSCCB) in order to make the carbon ceramic discs a standard for the high-end automotive sector.

Mixed Teams from the Start

When Brembo Marketing Director and Chairman of the BSCCB Supervisory Board Roberto Vavassori thinks today about the factors behind the success of the joint venture, three things immediately come to his mind: “From the very start, we had very open and direct communication culture. We put together a mix of people from both organizations for the teams. And we provided the joint venture colleagues access to both companies’ research and development.” This convinced the engineers on both sides. In addition, in recent years the joint venture became financially independent, as Markus Müller, SGL’s representative in BSCCB’s management team and as CFO responsible for the financials of the JV, states. “All of these factors shaped our most important resource, namely trust”, explains Furio Rozza, who came from the outside seven years ago to join BSCCB’s management as an independent general manager. Today, the brake discs are installed in the top models of almost all sports car manufacturers, from Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, over to Audi, Porsche and Ferrari as well as McLaren. Production is running at full speed in the two BSCCB facilities in Meitingen, Germany, and Stezzano, Italy, and is being expanded step by step. As Vavassori, Rozza and Müller proudly report, “Our joint product has since matured and found its place on the market.” The key to this has been and still is the successful partnership.

Science & SGL Carbon: Driving Lightweight Application Research

Before starting as the head of the LAC at SGL Carbon, Christoph Ebel spent almost eight years at the Technical University of Munich at the Chair of Carbon Composites, where he researched methods for processing carbon. The chair was co-founded by SGL and the company continues to support it to this day. Yet Ebel’s move to SGL Carbon is not the only evidence of the close links between the sciences and SGL. Time and again the company enters into close cooperations with scientific institutes on a variety of topics. One example: the LAC-affiliated Fiber Placement Center (FPC), which SGL Carbon and the Fraunhofer Research Institute for Casting, Composite and Processing Technology (IGCV) operate in cooperation with other partners from industry and the sciences. The FPC headquarters are at the SGL facility in Meitingen, Germany.

The Fiber Placement production process refers to the automated and material-efficient laying and cutting of fibers. With the center, both partners aim to incorporate the it into more high-volume applications across industries. “In this way, we can offer the technology, which originated from the aerospace industry, to other sectors at an industrial level,” explains Hannah Paulus, Head of the FPC, “while at the same time continuing to further develop the technology.” Preparations are already underway at the new center for realizing projects for secondary and primary structural components for aircraft and automotive manufacturers worldwide. This allows scientists at the IGCV to test their research results directly in practice.

Inside SGL Carbon: Partnerships as an Example

Cooperation with external partners is important, but it is of little value if in-house cooperation isn’t going well. “‘Convince through performance’, ‘be open-minded‘ and ‘create momentum’ are the central values of our corporate culture,” says SGL Carbon Group Vice President Human Resources Birgit Reiter. The new employer brand, which is currently in development, will also be aligned to these values. “In the past we suffered too much from a silo mentality,” CEO Köhler says. “Only by thinking and acting beyond internal borders can we support our customers as a reliable partner.”

Interdivisional Cooperation

The in-house Digital Customer Experience initiative illustrates how this interdivisional cooperation works. The project’s goal is to exploit the potential of digitization in the sales division across the individual business units. An interdisciplinary team was formed to implement the project: three experts from CFM, three specialists from GMS and two IT specialists. Additional experts are added depending on the project status. The idea is working. “The spirit of cooperation is great,” says Florian Neumann, who coordinated the project across the board in the first phase. In five months, the team identified four customer groups, each with different needs and a multitude of individual digitization measures.

Interdisciplinary cooperation is also particularly important in research and development. With this in mind, Kristina Klatt, Rebecca Schuster and a team from the Central Innovation (CI) division worked together with Michael Mändle and other colleagues from the CFM unit—together they developed a completely new carbon fiber for aerospace applications. What is called the Advanced Modulus (AM) fiber is somewhat thicker than conventional aerospace fibers, yet it is particularly strong and effective. “The development of the AM fiber is also a good example of how we understand the role of CI, namely as a seismograph for innovation trends and interactive driver of developments that ultimately enhance SGL Carbon’s product portfolio,” says Senior Vice President CI Tilo Hauke.

The AM fibers, the leaf springs for Volvo, the Brembo-SGL brake discs, the FPC and the cooperation with Pierburg: with its new aspiration for particularly intensive cooperation, the new SGL Carbon wants to make a difference—and is often making one already today. “Being open, listening, providing inspiration—that’s what counts,” Köhler says. “We want to take our partnerships seriously, because only genuine partnership can bring our customers and partners forward together with us.”

Being open, listening, providing inspiration — that’s what counts, We want to take our partnerships seriously, because only genuine partnership can bring our
customers and partners forward together with us.

Dr. Jürgen Köhler, SGL Carbon's CEO

The AM fibers, the leaf springs for Volvo, the Brembo-SGL brake discs, the FPC and the cooperation with Pierburg: with its new aspiration for particularly intensive cooperation, the new SGL Carbon wants to make a difference—and is often making one already today. “Being open, listening, providing inspiration—that’s what counts,” Köhler says. “We want to take our partnerships seriously, because only genuine partnership can bring our customers and partners forward together with us.”

Contact us

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to call or write us.

* Required fields