Apps and blisters

amount of walking to get round the 22 or so halls means your blisters get blisters so a good pair of shoes is essential!

This year though I had a secret weapon – the EMO app which I downloaded onto my smartphone in good time for the show. All credit to the show organiser – the app was excellent and enabled me to exercise at least some degree of order to the way I attacked the halls. It meant I could highlight the stands I wanted to visit and then sort them in hall order.

It wasn’t quite intelligent enough to advise me when the person I wanted to see wasn’t actually on the stand or went home two days ago, but that’s maybe expecting too much. All joking aside, at the next EMO in Milan in 2015, if you need to visit multiple companies in different halls, the app could save you a lot of legwork.

EMO may be tough on the tootsies but it’s still a really good vibrant show. Over 2,100 exhibitors from 43 different countries were on hand to showcase their innovations and over the six days of the event a total of just under 145,000 trade visitors from over 100 nations descended on Hannover. EMO remains a place where people actually do business – one out of five visitors reported placing an order at the show with the same figure looking to do the same soon after.

In terms of the exhibiting companies themselves, the vast majority seized the opportunity to promote a wealth of new innovations and products. DMG/Mori Seiki for example in their usual fashion occupied the whole of hall 2 encompassing an area about as big as Scotland! Nearly 100 hundred machines – 18 of which were world premieres – hummed busily away and whether you’re a fan of DMG/Mori machines or not, their EMO stand is always a sight to behold. To call setting it up a logistical challenge would surely be the understatement of the decade!

But not all exhibitors were focused on new technology. During a press conference at the show, Haas Automation’s global general manager Bob Murray announced that the company in the immediate future would be focusing a bit less on developing new machines and a lot more on making the existing product range even better. “We know we can build really good machines,” he stated. “The challenge for us now is making them even better value for money through improved reliability, connectivity, performance and ease of use.” All that said, Haas is still looking to release a new CNC control next year!