Visionaries 2024 In association with
‘Our biggest strength might be our lack of specialisation’
Patrick Gailer, Managing Director of Phil-Vision and its Chief Vision Design Officer, on the spectrum of opportunities the company has and the competitive advantage that offers
What vision integration services does your company provide and in what sectors? That’s a difficult but easy question. We’re only seven years old, and we are continuously changing. We started with pure integration – doing a lot of software – but we saw that we needed hardware to deal with solutions as well. I would say that, today, the most interesting service for us is really doing subsystems. There are bigger machine builders who want an advanced vision system in their machines, but aren’t capable of providing that. So, we provide a subsystem that is very integrated, very connected to communication, and very adapted to speeds and needs. In terms of markets – this might be our biggest strength, but we don’t have a specialisation. The only thing I can say is we try not to get into the automotive market – all the rest, we do. I would say we follow trends, but there’s no fixed market. We do a lot of electronics, but we also work with money, food, print, parts of this new battery sector – pretty much all markets that need vision systems. We are a highly engineering-driven company, so we can tackle complex projects. We love to do easy stuff, but no one wants us to do that! Usually, we end up doing the challenging stuff, such as resolution. If you do a visual system working at 17 metres-a-second, that’s the kind of thing we handle.
Would you say that this is a unique position to be in? Do you find your competitors tend to specialise more, or is it common for organisations such as yours to have such a broad range of market sectors? Well, like I said, it’s not perfect. It comes with scale, and we will change – this is changing. Maybe starting back again, the history of Phil-Vision – we’re not as young as we look. I’ve been in the market since 1999, and I’ve seen all the big guys. I saw how Vitronic, Viscom, and Basler
all started: most started as integrators. They found that special project and then specialised. For instance, Basler started doing CD inspection, and when it couldn’t get the cameras, it developed its own and went into the camera market, and now it is one of the leaders. Viscom started with postal sorting and now leads in motorway and vehicle inspection. All these guys were small integrators with specialties that grew. We haven’t found our specialty yet, but being in this floating phase allows us not to have a lot of direct competitors. We know the competitors we do have,
but we never interact with them. If there’s a system on the market that already works, we say: “OK, we won’t copy it.” There are two reasons people come to us: either the existing system has a flaw – it doesn’t work fast enough, it doesn’t look good enough, or it’s not cheap enough – and we may be able to change something; or, we may say the system works fine. We only come to the market when there’s still something missing. And the cool thing about vision systems is that innovation never stops. Since 1999, people have constantly come to us saying: “I want to solve this, and no system exists – can you help me?”
Do you handle projects all the way through, from consultation to installation and ongoing support? There are machines – let’s say this is the most difficult part for a small organisation. Especially now, things are changing a bit in our favour again. Of course, the market has its phases. There’s a lot of invention needed right now. The automotive market is currently reinventing itself, and many other markets are changing, so there’s a need for more automation if you want to survive in Europe. People in certain jobs, such as quality control, don’t want to do repetitive tasks
24 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2024
anymore, and companies are losing that expertise. They want AI machines to gather that know-how before it’s lost because they believe the next generation won’t have it. This is the part we’re dealing with – it’s changing. Regarding your question about project scope, when one of our customers is building a machine, they often don’t have the people for ongoing support. Even though we consider ourselves smart people capable of engineering, second-level support, and maintenance, we can’t handle first-level support. It’s the customer’s machine – they have the organisation. But even then, they often don’t have the people, so we end up helping with first- level support. Usually, we’re involved at the second level, handling maintenance, integrating new cameras, and adapting to changes such as when you can’t get a camera due to a situation such as Covid, we design another one. That’s usually what we do throughout the lifecycle of our customers.
What work have you done in the past few years that you believe qualifies you as an IMVE ‘visionary’? Can you share an example of an innovative solution that you’ve worked on? We work a lot with NDAs, so, with 90% of our projects, we’re not able to disclose them. But we have accumulated some that we can talk about. One example was stopping windmills when birds of prey are approaching them. The technology, especially in Germany, is still interesting because we want to have renewable energy, but there are people who don’t want windmills, especially in Germany. In Germany, there’s a concern that if a bird is killed by a windmill, it’s a big issue, so this project was about not stopping the windmill for half a year when birds are in the area, but just stopping it when a bird
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