Creating strong connections

ISMR sat down with Camillo Brena, Eagle Lasers’ marketing director, at EuroBLECH to discover the company’s latest fibre laser innovations, customer service philosophy and views on global market developments.

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Fibre laser pioneer, the Eagle Group, is headquartered in Wałcz, Poland, and present in over 30 countries through its branches and distributors. It is a technology and R&D company specialising in fibre laser systems and automation.

Believing that fibre laser technology would be an industry game-changer, it has invested in this technology from its inception to create new fibre laser machines and automation systems. These are designed, programmed and manufactured in accordance with Industry 4.0 via Eagle-developed software and automation systems. The company has launched award-winning 6kW, 8kW, 10kW, 12kW, 20kW and 30kW machines. Today, its most powerful fibre laser-cutting machines boast 40kW of power and up to 6G acceleration.

The debut of Eagle’s revolutionary FlowIN system, along with its upgraded 40kW iNspire 2.0 fibre laser cutting machine, attracted significant attention and kept its booth buzzing at EuroBLECH in Hanover this October. The FlowIN integrated fibre laser system can separate and manage waste at the speed of cutting, ensuring that only finished parts exit the machine without leftover skeletons. The skeleton is cut into smaller pieces for easy waste management and improved material utilisation, eliminating the need for a pallet-changer.

Eagle Lasers also provided live demonstrations of its CraneMaster and eTower modular automation and storage systems on its booth at the trade show in Germany, with an eye on maximizing productivity.

ISMR sat down with Camillo Brena, Eagle Lasers’ marketing director, at EuroBLECH to discover the company’s latest fibre laser innovations, customer service philosophy and views on global market developments.

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ISMR: Tell us about the new products, concepts and technologies that you brought to your booth at EuroBLECH at Hanover this October?

CB: We decided to bring something completely new to the market this year at EuroBLECH. We are a young, disruptive company (now almost 20 years old) and were among the first to introduce high-power fibre laser cutting systems on the market. With a history of almost two decades, Eagle has come to a deep understanding of the industry’s challenges and our answer to them has been to create an entirely different solution, FlowIN.

FlowIN was designed to tackle the sorting problem through a breakthrough concept that completely eliminates combs and pallet-changer. In doing so, it eliminates all comb-related issues such as comb cleaning, comb cutting, parts being welded to combs, micro and nanojoints. It also allows for sorting without compromising cutting speed or requiring inefficient nesting patterns that need more space between parts, so it makes better use of materials and features an innovative waste-management system.

How did we achieve this? By completely shifting our perspective and changing the way that we cut. Instead of focusing on cutting the part, we focused on cutting the scrap around it. The result is that only ready-cut, scrap-free parts exit the machine and sorting becomes as easy as a pick-and-place process.

FlowIN’s disruptive approach has a huge impact on productivity. The machine becomes a continuous cutting system, solving three steps in one cycle. The FlowIN system features Eagle’s signature components such as the award-winning eVa Cutting Head; linear motors on all axes; a carbon fibre traverse; a polymer concrete machine body and Eagle Eye fault-detection technology. We have also developed FlowINCo, which is the coil-cutting version.

ISMR: How do you see global fibre laser markets developing around the world? Are there any particular trends that you can identify?

CB: The market this year has been very difficult for everyone. The fibre laser-cutting market is entering a new and more mature phase with some companies using fibre laser technology for the last 20 years, and more adopting it every year because of its obvious benefits.

Thanks to our collaboration with IPG and Eagle’s innovative vision, we were pioneers in betting for high powers and, over the last few years, we have seen a trend towards increasing laser power and performance across the board. But the truth is that to really exploit the full advantages of high powers, the entire laser-cutting ecosystem needs to be built to handle it. And power is not the only variable. Innovations should start to focus on tackling other challenges, such as automation and sorting. That’s why I believe that Eagle’s FlowIN will be a real game-changer.

Labour shortages are a real issue, so automation around the laser is also gaining increasing importance. Next year, I believe the market will improve. Political changes, of course, will affect market developments and, in some countries, government incentives are encouraging manufacturers to adopt new technologies.

Competition is not a bad thing. It encourages us to offer better, more reliable machinery, technology and service to our customers. Since the advent of COVID-19, our clients have taken a different approach to the market. Their orders are smaller and more varied. Even the automotive market has changed to smaller and more flexible production with hybrid and EV models gaining popularity. Manufacturing machinery and tools should mirror this flexibility. Also, job shops today need versatile, dynamic systems that can process a range of material thicknesses with shorter lead times.

ISMR: You plan to launch an update of your Service Portal shortly. What is your overall customer service philosophy?

To read the rest of this interview in the November issue of ISMR, please see https://joom.ag/kz7d/p40