On the occasion of our 30th company anniversary, we look back on the development of INTRAVIS in a 6-part series. We shed light on where it all began, why INTRAVIS is actually called INTRAVIS, what influence a student had on our start in the plastic packaging industry, and how a vision has always driven us for 30 years now. Today: In Part 1, we look back at the beginnings of INTRAVIS.
On May 26, 1993, Dr. Gerd Fuhrmann registered INTRAVIS Gesellschaft für Lieferungen und Leistungen von bildgebenden und bildverarbeitenden Anlagen mbH - the official name of the company - as a company with the Aachen District Court. He had written his doctoral thesis in the field of microtomography and accordingly this was also the focus of his company: the development of tomography devices.
These are devices that can show the inside of an object in the form of a 3D image. "That's where the name INTRAVIS comes from, by the way. 'Intra' is Latin for 'inside' and 'vis' stands for visualizing. We wanted to visualize the inside with our devices," Dr. Fuhrmann, who is still our CEO today, elaborates on the meaning of his company's name.
Already in the founding year, the company built its first microtomograph and presented it to a well-known automotive company. The system was very well received, yet it was a flop. Why? "The internal processes of the automotive company - testing, budgeting, approval and ordering - would have taken about 2 years all together. With such a long wait, INTRAVIS would have been insolvent before the first system was delivered," says Dr. Fuhrmann.
So he had to come up with something new and took a step back. Instead of 3D, INTRAVIS concentrated from now on on 2D images as well as their evaluation. A first application quickly emerged. Dr. Fuhrmann looks back: "At that time, Aachen was a center of the sewing and textile industry. At that point, I got to know a technology-savvy manager of a large needle factory who told me, 'Build me a needle inspection system and if it works, I'll buy another one from you right away.' And so we built a system that could do extensive testing, replacing the previous manual testing of needles."
Even though needle production lost importance in the Aachen region over time, and has disappeared completely today, this marked the start of a promising business and INTRAVIS had successfully completed its first major order.
In the next part of our series, we will look at how INTRAVIS came to inspect plastic packaging and what influence a student had in the process.
