Wirtgen Group Technology Days 2024

2,700 guests from more than 100 countries responded to the invitation to visit the Wirtgen Group Technology Days 2024 in Göppingen. The overarching themes of the two-day event at the headquarters site of Kleemann GmbH were digitalisation and sustainability. True to the motto ‘Smarter. Safer. More Sustainable.’ the company group demonstrated products and technologies developed to enable the successful realisation of construction projects.

The Wirtgen Group impressed the professionals attending the event with numerous innovative systems and solutions, including eleven world premieres, and a clear vision for the future of road construction. It showed that the new developments are a response to the pressing challenges of our times. ‘Innovation is in our genes. As we are aware from the feedback we receive from our customers, there is increasing demand for smarter, safer and more sustainable solutions in markets around the globe. We have concentrated our efforts on this, and can now present state-of-the-art machine technologies and digital solutions with which we support and assist our customers in all phases of the digital transformation. At the same time, we attach great importance to holistic solutions for their construction projects – from the planning phase through to documentation and analysis’, says Dr Volker Knickel, CEO of the Wirtgen Group. The motto of the event – ‘Smarter. Safer. More Sustainable.’ – succinctly describes this road map for the future.

Machine exhibition with 11 world premieres

With around 70 exhibits for a range of different application scenarios, Wirtgen, Vögele, Hamm, Kleemann, Benninghoven, Ciber and John Deere showed the concrete solutions with which they will support the industry on their journey to digitalised and sustainable road construction and materials processing.

Insights into the technologies of the future

Specialists from the Wirtgen Group and internationally recognised experts provided first-hand insights into the technologies of the future. In the programme of presentations on the subject of sustainability, they shared their experiences and knowledge on subjects including sustainable construction, the potentials for CO₂ reduction offered by cold recycling and the recycling of hot-mixed asphalt, the handling of low-temperature asphalt and the infrastructure required for the reliable operation of electrically powered crushing and screening plants.

On the subject of digitalisation, they highlighted the various potentials of technological change. The main topic here was the John Deere Operations Center for construction equipment, the digital platform for the optimisation of processes, machines and services, and how users can benefit from it in their everyday work.

The breadth and depth of the presentations underscored that the Wirtgen Group has a road map that lays out how it can support its customers with reliable digital products and system and service solutions, in this way advancing the digital transformation of the industry.

Production systems live at work

The greatest ecological and economic potentials lie in the totality of the construction process. That the machines and systems achieve high-quality results through connected processes in the form of so-called Production Systems was shown by the various live demonstrations – for instance in the use of low-temperature asphalt, concrete and asphalt recycling or soil stabilisation. They also illustrated how the target-oriented utilisation of technologies can lead to predictable results, greater precision, higher quality of results and the consumption of fewer resources.

As Knickel explains: ‘This enables our customers to realise more construction projects with fewer resources, build and rehabilitate more infrastructure and simultaneously increase their profitability.’ At the same time, he emphasised that digital assistance systems and process automation also contribute to offsetting the shortage of qualified personnel throughout the industry: ‘This will in turn enable less-experienced operators to achieve results in the same quality as a skilled specialist would do.’ On top of this, telematics solutions will deliver greater transparency about the operational status of customers’ fleets and enable them to carry out proactive, and therefore even more precisely targeted, servicing and maintenance of their machines.

A look behind the scenes

On a guided tour through the Kleemann production facilities, the host of the event gave the professional audience fascinating insights into the manufacturing process chain. Since the construction of the new plant in 2009, the highly specialised facility has been successively extended and, like all other factories of the company group, has been constantly upgraded for sustainable operation in line with the Wirtgen Group’s sustainability strategy. Today, the Kleemann plant is one of the world’s most modern facilities for the production of large crushing and screening machines. Many of the visitors were particularly impressed by the highly complex prefabrication centres in which the core components of the Kleemann machines are produced with exceptional precision.

‘Our focus on target-oriented expansion of our product portfolio in the past years now enables us to offer ideal solutions for all applications, no matter whether for recycling or the processing of natural stone. To achieve this, we have invested in areas such as the expansion of our production capacities and the improvement of our assembly and logistics processes’, says Kleemann CEO Alexander Knam, describing the development of the company’s headquarters site in Göppingen. He sees the specialist for materials processing equipment ideally positioned for the future: ‘With these investments, we have laid the foundation for the ongoing production of our products and technologies under ideal conditions, namely sustainably and efficiently’, says Knam.