Lantek presents its innovations and expansion plans at Blechexpo

Great interest was shown at Lantek’s first trade show appearance after the
Coronavirus outbreak, especially in the latest features and enhancements
that the pioneer of the digital transformation of companies in sheet metal
industry, has developed for its software portfolio – a product of 35 years
of experience in software development for sheet metal manufacturing. At the
same time, Lantek CEO Alberto López de Biñaspre shared details about the
company’s expansion plans following the new partnership with high-tech
company TRUMPF.

“We were very much looking forward to welcoming our visitors back to a trade
show after such a long absence due to COVID and to present the innovations
of Global Release 2021 to them in person – the response has been
tremendous,” said Christoph Lenhard, Lantek’s sales manager for Germany,
Austria and Switzerland, on the first day of the show. “It was a difficult
time, but we came out of it stronger because we learnt a lot. Our customers
have developed new needs, such as the increased requirement for compatible
solutions for both remote and office working. This new situation reinforces
our decision to develop a range of cloud products to service these new
realities.” To meet these objectives, Lantek has recruited a large number of
new specialists with the necessary expertise. This is necessary as, compared
to the development of software for desktop applications, the cloud requires
different programming skills and in-depth knowledge of infrastructure and
services.

Alberto López de Biñaspre, Managing Director of Lantek confirms that this
development pace will continue. “We have been experiencing double-digit
organic growth for years. At the end of the third quarter of this year,
sales were 30 percent higher than last year. We have traditionally invested
large proportions of our income in research and development. Through our new
partnership with TRUMPF, the largest industrial group in the machine tool
sector, we now have the necessary resources to increasingly pursue this
path. For 2022, we intend to make the largest investments in our company’s
history: We want to increase our commitment to research and development by
70 percent. To do this, we plan to grow our workforce by 50% over the next
twelve months from the current 260 employees worldwide, with a clear
emphasis on R&D and our international customer support team.” Lantek is
thinking long-term – with a growth plan that extends into 2025.

“Looking forward
This year, Lantek celebrates its 35th anniversary of its foundation, the
30th of the opening of our French subsidiary and the 25th since the
inauguration of its German one. López de Biñaspre emphasized the software
specialist’s commitment to its strategy as a multi-vendor supplier, “The
expansion plan not only strengthens our brand positioning but enhances our
international structure bracing and expanding our current international
organisation and footprint. Both TRUMPF and Lantek are family-owned
companies, so we share values and business principles and a common vision
for the future: to turn companies in the sheet metal industry into Smart
Factories, making them more efficient and competitive.”

The innovations in Lantek’s Global Release 2021, which Lantek presented at
Blechexpo, support this objective.
An overview:
Lantek Expert V2021 – programming solution for 2D cutting and punching
machines
Lantek Expert V2021 comes with 25 innovations that simplify and further
automate the process of cutting, punching and shearing sheet metal parts for
its customers:
•       Greater flexibility in importing parts, including drag-and-drop;
duplicate part detection and management; column customization during import;
and improved drawing management.
•       New options for more efficient destruction of remnant pieces and
skeletons, as well as redistribution of parts over the entire sheet to
optimize the rigidity of the skeleton.
•       Improvement of the import of external 3D CAD designs with the A2N
(Assembly To Nesting) importer, which allows automatic unfolding of most 3D
formats on the market, already taking into account the tool used for
bending.
•       The new spiral cut for hole cutting destroys the material inside the
hole so that it falls into the machine bed to avoid collisions and saving
the manual removal of waste material; the smoother and faster cutting
process avoids sharp corners and requires fewer cut start cycles.
•       Better lead in/out positions, nesting by zones, new micro-joint
treatments, automatic remanent dimensioning, options for skeleton
destruction, customization of the import window, and improvements in cost
calculation.

Lantek Flex3D – for tube and profile machining
The market for tube machining is growing rapidly, as is the number of new
machines, devices and technologies for cutting tubular parts. With its
innovations, Lantek Flex3d V2021 reflects the new requirements of the
industry:
•       Programming of any complex, even irregular pipe profiles.
•       64-bit architecture reduces programming time by about 15 percent.
•       Improved nesting capabilities for tube processing, additional zone
nesting tools and post-processor capabilities for the most complex machine
configurations – up to 5 percent material savings and 28 percent time
savings.
•       Optimization of hole cutting paths by zones and zig-zag movements
reduces non-cutting movements and automatically places the entry point for
each hole in the direction of machine travel; faster cutting times due to
reduced acceleration and deceleration movements.
•       Toolpath Smart Designer for irregularly shaped pipes: more options
for efficient cutting of existing profiles and ability for the programmer to
create a library of new cutting paths for new pipe profiles.
•       Switching to 64-bit: Redesigning the Steelwork module for a seamless
common interface, improving the performance of many programming tasks, and
increasing security and protection against malicious code.

Lantek MES und Lantek Integra
With Lantek MES and Lantek Integra, companies can manage their
manufacturing, accurately track resource utilization, orders, delivery
dates, quality and inventory levels, while maintaining traceability and the
flexibility to respond to changing circumstances, to name a few of the
advances. The complex interwoven processes required to achieve this have
received a great deal of attention from Lantek for the 2021 update:
•       Better real-time integration with machine control through Lantek WOS
Opentalk – automatic reporting of the job currently being produced on the
machine improves planning, workload monitoring and accurate forecasting of
delivery times for customer orders and quotations.
•       Better integration with Lantek Flex3D – more options for importing
3D CAD data (STEP, IGES, SAT) improve the quotation process.
•       User interface adaptation to current design standards – dark mode
option increases visual ergonomics, reduces eye strain and allows the screen
to adapt to current lighting conditions, and overall improves user comfort
at night or in dark environments.

Lantek Analytics
Lantek sees cloud-based solutions as the future of software. The solutions
are accessible around the clock from any location, save the cost of
expensive hardware and are flexible in their capacity. Updates and new
applications can also be easily implemented, which drastically reduces
operating costs. Global Release 2021 introduces the first SaaS (Software as
a Service) application in Lantek Analytics.

•       Access to this application possible from any device, from any place
and at any time.
•       More than 70 KPIs and 10 filters make visible what is currently
happening in the factory.
•       8 additional KPIs and a KPI self-service – define your own KPIs from
hundreds of available parameters via a simple wizard interface.

Lantek iQuoting and MetalShop
The iQuoting and MetalShop solutions, which are also cloud-based, are used
to create quotes for the customer easily, quickly and automatically. Access
is possible from any location and any internet-enabled device.

With Lantek MetalShop, customers using iQuoting can take advantage of the
round-the-clock availability of e-commerce with online quoting and sales. It
is a real opportunity for sheet metal companies to relieve their sales
department of the hassle of standard products, while reaching out to new
customers and markets that want an online platform.

About Lantek
Lantek is a multinational that is leading the digital transformation of
companies in the sheet metal and metal industry. With its smart
manufacturing software, it enables factories to be connected, turning them
into Smart Factories. It rounds off its range of services with CAD, CAM,
MES, and ERP solutions for companies that manufacture metal parts from sheet
metal, tubes, and profiles using any cutting technology (laser, plasma,
oxycut, waterjet, shearing, and punching).
Founded in 1986 in the Basque Country (Spain), one of the main European
centers of machine tool development, it enables the integration of sheet
metal and metal processing technologies with the most advanced manufacturing
control software. The company is currently the outstanding leader in its
sector thanks to its capacity for innovation and commitment to
internationalization. With more than 28,000 customers in over 100 countries
and 20 offices in 14 countries, it has an extensive network of distributors
with an international presence. In 2020, its international business
contributed to 88% of its revenue. www.lantek.com