Innovation
Technologies give the beat for our company, with innovations playing first fiddle. A lot of training is necessary to set the tone exactly:
Thus, innovation management cooperates worldwide to track down and implement ideas. With our partners and other companies, e.g. the innovation association quer.kraft , we exchange views about technological developments and investigate potential fields of action. By Corporate Venturing , we provide room for good ideas to learn and grow.
Technology at Diehl
Advanced Materials
Lightweight construction, specific copper alloys, carbon fibers, smart materials or “self-reproducing” molecules: the development of new materials influences production processes and products alike. Advanced materials facilitate new applications, optimize products and have cost-reduction potential.
How can these advanced materials be used in a profitable way? This is a question that concerns the Diehl group as a whole. Constantly pushing to the limits of technological possibilities, we work to make new products available to our customers. To this end, we traditionally invest considerably in research and development and also expand our knowledge by collaborating with renowned research institutes and universities.
Constant examination of materials and processes for potential improvement is a central element of our self-conception. Especially sensor, storage and lighting technology promise still a lot of potential for future material developments.
Need for Security
In a world that, in many ways, is spinning faster and where countries and cultures are growing together more and more, threats that were once far off are drawing alarmingly close. Are we still safe in Europe? How will climate change affect our environment? What are the negative impacts of digital progress on our lives? Mobility and digital communication spurs development. This development has great potential but also brings along risks, particularly for globally active companies. Therefore, the need for good security concepts is greater today than ever before.
Companies are treading new paths to protect their networked production plants. For example, energy supplies are decentralized more than before so as to prevent a complete standstill in the event of problems. This also applies to Diehl. What are the potential attacks that threaten companies and how can companies protect themselves against these? This question is not only relevant to the cyber security department of Diehl Defence, but also to almost all areas of business dealings of the Group. Naturally, we pay special attention to all our products whose misuse can cause serious damage.
For this reason, Diehl Metering has been working for many years on the secure and reliable reading of values in consumption measurement systems. Data security requires a technologically developed and absolutely protected key assignment to facilitate secure communication between measurement station, reading device and higher instances. Thanks to our high technological effort, we are one of the leading manufacturers in the industry.
Smart Life
When refrigerators speak to smartphones: day-to-day products that are equipped with microcomputers and called “smart” constitute the “Internet of Things”. Household devices that can be easily controlled via smartphones or tablets. Intuitive handling and appealing product design attract a large number of customers to use the products.
Augmented reality – digitally augmented perception on a screen – has become a mass phenomenon, last not least, with games like “Pokemon Go”. “Smart Life” uses this technology for the simplified operation of various devices and production facilities. However, the resulting flood of data via Cloud Services also harbors the risks of data abuse. At Diehl Controls, not only do we consider technological development of controls and electronics for household devices as our job, but also the development of secure operating concepts to reliably and safely facilitate the increasing networking of household devices.
Human interfaces, augmented reality and smart devices are topics that we work on in almost all branches of the Group - including Diehl Aviation. Today, no aircraft flies without modern communication technology for passengers. As specialists in aircraft cabins, we work with cabin management systems and optical projection systems that make it possible to bring more comfort on board.
Industry 4.0
For the optimization of its production plants, the Diehl-Group can look back on a long tradition of more than a hundred years. To survive in the market, long-lasting and investment-intensive systems are continuously redesigned and adapted to meet the technological requirements as well as for economic reasons. Today, digital technologies bring a new dimension to production processes. Industry 4.0 makes it possible for machines to interact with each other. Networked production gets organized increasingly all by itself, as all connected plants and processes are interrelated and complement each other to form a smart industrial value chain. The resulting data streams can be read easily and controlled in a more targeted manner.
In all divisions of the Group, we strive to practically integrate digital transformation into our traditionally grown production. This requires all processes to be re-thought and the following questions to be asked: “How can products or product parts be tracked in real time on their way through the plant?”. Who is the owner of production data once data streams converge in the Cloud and when are robots and humans able to efficiently and safely work on a machine together?
On the way to a digital future of production, tests with data glasses, for instance in the forging technology used at Diehl Metall or digital shift logs at Diehl Controls, bring to light astonishing findings that lead us to further progress. The advancing digitalization of our production will also contribute to our products being more strongly influenced by this digitalization and to making more and more digital applications useful to our suppliers and customers.