It doesn’t always take an important innovation or an order worth millions for a supplier like Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST) to chalk up a success and polish its reputation. Sometimes it’s enough to get a customer out of trouble. That’s exactly what the Lead Center Fluid Power Industry did for the prosthetics manufacturer Ottobock.
Leg prostheses create mobility. They enable people with certain disabilities to stand stably and walk briskly. Ottobock is one of the world’s leading suppliers in the orthopedics and prosthetics field, and relies on sealing solutions from Freudenberg in different product lines. A few years ago, the contract for a FST u-ring designed for a knee prothesis expired. After a final delivery to fill Ottobock’s inventory, the order to the FST’s Kufstein, Austria facility was not extended. The series production mold was then scrapped with the approval of the Ottobock facility in Vienna, Austria.
But there was something that all the participants didn’t know at the time: As the series-production order was running out, Ottobock had launched a development project for a leg prosthesis at a different facility, in Duderstadt, Germany, that was relying on exactly the same u-ring.
As the series production launch for the new leg prosthesis approached, the inventory of FST u-rings began to run out at Ottobock. And without a mold, there was no way to resupply them.
Two factors made the situation worse. The rod seal for the artificial knee was not a common catalog part. The job called for a challenging precision elastomer seal on a micro scale, which had to meet stringent requirements for friction and durability. In addition, the responsibility for these types of hydraulic seals had been transferred from the company’s Kufstein facility to the Schwalmstadt Lead Center in Germany specializing in the products.
Teamwork at Turbo Speeds
Michal Jezek, Account Manager, General Industry, pulled out all the stops to help the customer. In Schwalmstadt, he had the employees’ full attention and found them to be enthusiastic collaborators. “I would like to highlight Hartmut Näser and Marco Schönwälder who made key contributions to the effort’s ultimate success. We were even able to make prototypes available to the customer three weeks before the deadline,” Jezek said. The parts passed all the customer’s tests, even though they were produced with a new mold at a “new” site with the original material. The project was saved, and the badly needed new prostheses were available to patients on time.
The ability to work at turbo speeds depended on the effective cooperation between Kufstein and Schwalmstadt. Jezek gave an example: “We were able to draw on earlier designs from Kufstein for the reconstruction of the tool. The teamwork opened up other opportunities for us to tackle challenging projects like this and win more business from Ottobock.”
