How to build complex structures from easy and standardized components? Who to ask when you are stuck? Little did our engineers know that when building castles with colorful bricks during childhood, their play would pave the foundation for their career in the Industry 4.0 – even if the professional field of hydraulics is a tad more complicated. We know our technology components – from the individual valve to a complete system solution with controls and sensor technology. We study global market developments and how customers respond to them. We develop new standard products and design customized solutions.

There are still a few guiding principles from the playful universe of colorful bricks that have their validity. For example, it is still a good idea to return to the collective know-how when developing solutions, especially at ARGO-HYTOS whose entities are spread across the globe. This way a project proposal might come into an engineer’s inbox in the Pacific Time while the circuit diagram is drawn in the ESZ-Zone and the 3D model is prepared on the other side of the globe – the sun never sets for the Applications Team scattered across the world. Our international industry managers keep an eye on the global demands and have a close exchange with local Applications Teams, which carry out regional adaptations and new developments that adhere to local demands. The root of the success is always the network of people and their competences. This requires a lot of organizational effort, but it is worth it. And our motto is: It is better to communicate worldwide than to reinvent the wheel locally.

Because there are more than enough wheels at ARGO-HYTOS: A large pool of standard components and pre-assembled system parts build the base for function-specific and custom solutions, similar to the colorful bricks from way back then. Here too, experts from different technical domains, regions and departments have to come together. The recipe for success is always the network; usually components from different domains such as sensor, motion control and filter technology have to be combined. Collaboration and knowledge transfer are a given since the result is a lot more than just a sum of the individual components. This is especially true for the collective intelligence of the engineers: it happens occasionally that a task that looks completely new at first has already been solved or approached similarly in a different entity.

Often there are standard solutions for problems that seem highly specific at first glance. It is not rare that customized systems exist, which can be adapted into new solutions with slight modifications. Many ideas and documented processes are behind the results of our specialists, which are applied to the next tasks and customer requests. This way, comparable projects can be realized more efficiently and speedily.

Even if the signals across the world are currently pointing more in the direction of confrontation, division and separation: We at ARGO-HYTOS will continue to build bridges in the company and encourage open communication to come together – even if we are geographically scattered. Network and information have become as important of a resource in the 21st century as raw materials and energy. Network and information are the resources that are practically without any limitations and readily available – resources that only become more powerful, the more they are used.