INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Getting the best out of an image
As Framos turns 40, we talk to the firm’s CEO, Andreas Franz, on diversifying into vertical markets outside factory automation
‘T
he distribution model has become a tough business.’ Dr Andreas Franz, chief executive of Framos, is clear
about this. But Framos has come a long way from being the pure distributor – albeit still an expert in imaging – it started out as 40 years ago, when his father, Bernd Franz, set up Framos Electronic Vertriebs as an electronics distributor before entering the vision market with Sony CCD sensors. Andreas Franz explains that, today, any
business Framos does involves adding a service of some kind, whether that’s consulting services, hardware or software development, all the way up to production management. ‘It’s still a distribution core,’ he says, ‘but around that we offer all the elements to help customers build cameras and get the best out of their image.’ Franz, who took over managing the company in 2008, says that, in this way,
Framos can halve the time to market for its customers by improving their development cycle, and enabling high-volume production they couldn’t do themselves. In the 1980s, when Framos was starting
out supplying Sony CCDs, all of its customers were camera builders, and until the early 2000s most of the applications were inside the factory. Now, the customer groups vary widely, and the majority of Framos’ business is not factory automation but applications in sports, entertainment, medical settings, cameras on drones and many others. ‘Te industrial side is still strong and is still growing, but other areas are growing faster,’ Franz says. Te move from CCD to CMOS also changed
Framos’ customer group, with competencies gradually shifting more towards software rather than hardware. Tis is combined with the fact that, now, the entire architecture is
20 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE VISION YEARBOOK 2021/22
The company’s in-house lab was set up to provide sensor-specific image tuning for the Nvidia Jetson platform
moving from PC-based to edge devices or cloud-based architectures. Tis triggered Framos’ expansion into the processor landscape. ‘We now have a relationship with Nvidia
and Intel,’ Franz says. ‘We didn’t touch them before and we don’t have distribution partnerships with them; we are technology partners because we develop on, and around, their ecosystem. Tat’s only possible because the entire architecture changed.’ Today, Framos generates annual sales
of around €60m and has 150 employees worldwide. It began as a family business, but has turned into what Franz describes as a ‘family spirit’ business, because now decisions are made by a management board of 10 people as a team effort. Te company continues to build on its
imaging expertise and the services it can deliver to its customers. It runs training courses on aspects such as the colour pipeline of digital cameras and characterising cameras according to the EMVA 1288 standard. It also now provides sensor-specific image tuning for the Nvidia Jetson platform to maximise image quality through an in-house laboratory it has set up. ‘It’s easy to get an image out of a sensor,’
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Framos
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