Festo’s Mason, Ohio facility, which is being expanded.
At this week’s PackExpo show at Chicago’s McCormick Place, Festo’s President and CEO Rich Huss chatted a bit about his company’s future while at the company’s booth.
“This has been a busy year for Festo,” Huss said. “We are going to continue to expand in the United States. We had an expansion this year — we had an expansion of our Livermore facility from about 20,000 square feet to a little more than 55,000 square feet. We opened up a product development center in Boston mainly for fluidic valves in the medical industry.”
Huss also noted that the company opened up a “Festo experience center” as they call it. What it really is, he said, is an innovation hub in Santa Clara, Calif. to collaborate with all the venture capital and all of the new ideas that are coming out of Silicon Valley. They also broke ground on an expansion in Mason, Ohio a little ahead of schedule. That will more than double the size of that facility by 2022.
“So, the investments are continuing, and we continue to grow our footprint in North America,” he said.
Huss said that the Industrial Internet of Things introducing 4.0 is actually becoming reality now with Festo, thanks to the digitalization of pneumatics. With the Festo Motion Terminal, a user can take one set of hardware and add hundreds of different applications simply by changing the software using the apps.
“If you need to make changes on the fly you can do so, and you can do it right down to the terminal. You can go right down to a valve in the pressure zone and find out when something’s leaking and that can go right up to your network. So preventative maintenance, changes, flexible, on the fly are all there.”
“I challenge you to find anybody that has the software tools besides these things, the ease of assembly of these products, the ease of use, and the intuitive nature of them,” he said. “And that’s what it’s all about, to get everybody that uses our products to get them sized properly, to get them installed rapidly, and commissioned quickly — and to use them for the full productivity of their machinery and of their plant. Intelligent, intuitive designs are what Festo is all about — easy to apply and to use.”
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