LAN Handling Technologies

Lan Handling Technologies was founded in an attic in 1969 by drawing three palletisers, a loader and unloader for the first customer Burcht Conserven, the business grew considerably in the nineties. In 1995 90% was export and complete machine lines for canned fruit and vegetables and (pet) food factories were built at that time. After the year 2000 customers expected more and more data and capacity. Robots were integrated in the handling systems to meet these needs. In July 2015 Lan acquired Abar Automation BV, situated in Halfweg near Amsterdam. Together they now also manufacture handling systems for bags, bins, stretch and flow-wrapped products. And from here? These days they partner with universities and innovative start-ups on topics such as Industry 4.0, Digital Twins and Big Data.

Prespective came in on the Digital Twin topic and to make an Industrial Assets library happen. Right now, the project is not already finishes, it’s an ongoing process. But we would like to share already some amazing milestones we delivered so far.

The question of LAN Handling Technologies was to provide the sales engineers with a tool to design a modular production line while they at a potential customer. Because these days it’s hard to explain distinguishing features are. Especially since the world is becoming a place where technology is becoming more difficult. For someone who needs to make the decision whether to buy, it’s even harder with no background in this kind of digital twin technology.

So, what we did is to create a visual tool for sales to support conversations well and to help companies to move faster from ETO to CTO. So more and more toward modular assets that can be linked in a flexible way together.

Our skilled people managed therefore, to create a virtual environment in Prespective for LAN to make internal choices for the customer easier and at the same time to make the choice easier to pick the modules the customer should build.

When are you going to invest in real-time 2D? Prespective makes the future happen.

With the use of Prespective its possible to test with several digital twins in the virtual word. Testing more and more configurations while the lead time is so much shorter than creating all the set-ups in real life. What you can do with Prespective is truly amazing. With Prespective’s kinematic toolset it is even possible predict possible collisions between the C-arch and other hardware.