“Solutions for new dimensions” is your theme this year. Tell us about your expectations from this show and your participation in LIGNA?

Jürgen Köppel : It goes without saying that LIGNA is the absolute leading exhibition worldwide in our industry. It means here you can see the trends, you can see the future, and it’s also the idea which we have with “solutions in new dimensions”. By new dimensions, what are the new dimensions? First of all, quality you can always expect from Leitz. And also we are talking about productivity, flexibility, sustainability, and all this knowledge here – boasts our know-how. And that’s exactly what we want to convey during this LIGNA and especially underline that we are not just selling tools, that we are selling whole process know-how over the entire life cycle.

Talking about LIGNA, this time we have a new hall layout? How has been the response from the visitors and also from your end?

Jürgen Köppel : The idea of a new layout for LIGNA came up after the last LIGNA finished. Why the new layout? Because, there was always a differentiation between the industrial customer and the small to medium sized customers. But there is actually no difference anymore. As you see, small to medium sized customers use a lot of automation, a lot of all these connectivity and you see also the bigger customers making batch size one production or small batch-size production which was in former times typical for the small carpenter shops. And seeing this, we adopted – and if I say we, it was Deutsche Messe, VDMA, and the group of companies – we adopted the the layout of LIGNA in order to reflect this. And for Leitz, it was also a new step because in former times, we always had two booths, so we have now one big booth here. We show the whole Leitz competence in one roof.

Coming to LIGNA and new products, how does the ‘marathon high performance coating’ help in increasing a tool life?

Jürgen Köppel :It goes without saying as marathon is already in the works, marathon is a tough thing, it’s a long thing, it’s a long lasting run – more than 42 kilometers. And that’s exactly what the message is for our customers. Once you want to have your durability, marathon is exactly the right thing to choose. But you have to be very selective where you put it in. And that’s exactly the process know-how and the production know-how which we are giving to the customer. But, not only marathon is a new thing here. We have also 7 other new innovations which we are exhibiting to the customer. And underline the new dimensions again – we only show the customer where his benefit is in order to be more competitive.

Your product Leitz ProfilCut Q Premium is the fastest profile tooling system in the industry. What makes it so fast?

Jürgen Köppel :It goes without saying once we are talking about productivity; the most important thing on productivity is speed. But speed is always a critical thing because high speed might emulate also to a less quality. And that was exactly the thing which we put into our new tooling. It’s a hybrid tooling that means we combine various aspects into the ProfilCut Q Premium. And by this, we can build 120 meters result without any negative impacts for the quality, because quality is essential for our customers, is essential for Leitz.

Wait till our Sept-Oct issue of Wood & Panel to read and watch the entire interview.