Walter and Comara Create Joint Venture

In a move designed to further their commitment to and enhance their support of customers in the U.S. and around the world who are striving to meet the challenges of 21st century manufacturing, Walter USA, LLC (Waukesha, WI) has joined with long-standing software partner Comara GmbH to create a new company under joint leadership. “This is a key step in our drive to provide our customers in North America and around the world with Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0 solutions,” notes Mirko Merlo, the president of Walter AG (Tübingen, Germany).

This is not a new goal for either of these companies: Walter, now with the majority stake in the new company, is continuing to pursue its evolution from a tool manufacturer to a provider of comprehensive production solutions. Meanwhile, Comara has been working closely with them since 2012 on connectivity and smart manufacturing issues, building on their strengths in collecting, evaluating and using real-time data to connect machines. Together with Walter, the company also develops software solutions for connecting all devices in the production environment: From machines and tools through to logistics and databases.

The synergies made possible by this new collaboration will enable Walter to digitize and to connect tools with greater precision and sophistication and optimize them using real-time data. Combined with their existing Tool·ID system that allows the user to transfer tool data from the pre-setting device to the machine tool and to evaluate the parameters that are run on the machine. This will give rise to the production of “Smart Tools” in the future.

Comara, with its appCom, offers machine manufacturers and industrial companies their own platform for individual apps special software modules, geared to the production environment. In collaboration with Walter, their aim is to develop further solutions and make them available to additional machine and device manufacturers and end users.

www.walter-tools.com,  www.comara.de/en