One day, the pragmatist realized that the production of large pliers showed potential for optimization. For him, the typical approach of increasing the degree of automation with robots and complex, standardized clamping devices was not enough. In his opinion, metal cutting was the weak point – clamping and milling the pliers’ heads took too long. Moreover, the spindles had a limited capacity. Danz explains further: “In addition, the product variety was severely limited and retooling was very time-consuming. So it was clear that we had to rethink the production line. Our goal was to significantly shorten the production process and keep the set-up time as short as possible”.

The greatest challenge was the building structure at the mechanical production site. According to Danz, the production hall is “a GDR building from the 1960s, where the width of the stud frames and the load capacity of the floors set the pace”. The only solution was to bring in production technology from Chemnitz. After all, the Heckert compact series is characterized by one feature in particular: it offers maximum productivity with minimal space requirements.