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28 What are your company’s special services and what makes them so unique? Oliver Hermanns: In vehicles, but also in other products, wiring harnesses with lengths of several kilometers are installed in very confined design spaces. Typically, these harnesses are manufactured and mounted manually. During the design phase, the designers cannot yet predict whether the systems will fit into the tight installation space or possibly be damaged due to motion. We have developed a sys- tem that provides real-time solutions for the digital layout and validation of wiring har- nesses and hose systems. With our soft- ware IPS Cable Simulation, modifications or optimizations of the wiring system can be made throughout the entire concept and development phase in realtime. The same applies to the design of hose systems, where engineers using our real-time simu- lation in design and validation can reduce costly iteration cycles or prototyping to a minimum. This unique selling proposition of our company brings a great benefit to the OEMs. But your skills are not limited to wiring systems and hose systems? Oliver Hermanns: We are constantly en- gineering and improving our applications. Graphics: © fleXstructures fleXstructures – more than a hidden champion Interview with Oliver Hermanns, Managing Director of fleXstructures GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany fleXstructures was founded in 2012 in Kaiserslautern as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathe- matics ITWM. Meanwhile the company is an appreciated partner of the automotive industries and their suppliers with its progressive solutions, in particular for the digital layout and validation of cables and hoses. One example is our digital human model IPS IMMA , which is a digital 3D software tool that behaves like a natural human being in the computer simulation. With IPS IMMA, aspects of mountability, accessibility and er- gonomics can be accounted for in the devel- opment which means that human beings are included in product development and pro- duction planning. This can significantly help to detect and correct planning errors in early phases of complex products and processes. What external factors are currently driving your business to a particular extent? Oliver Hermanns: In general, the increasing need for digitization plays the most import- ant role. The goal is to do without expensive tests with prototypes and to enter into series production earlier. Until now, design was made with CAD and very time-consuming simulation. In the areas of our core compe- tencies, there were simply no possibilities