In our article series “Testia Experts”, we present short interviews with our employees – the experts that really make Testia what it is. In this issue we speak with Ingo Marx, who is our Leader of Technical Sales and Business Development
You can also watch this interview on YouTube.
1) Tell us about yourself and your career path
I started 40 years ago on a shipyard in Kiel as an electronics technician. It was a very interesting time. So afterwards, I started a career at the German airforce with a couple of personal trainings, personal education. I worked in this special field for eight years.
Afterwards, I studied electronical engineering, on one hand, and business administration to think about: “what can I do with these both different fields? Yes. I would like to bring all these together in.” I thought this can be a good idea. So afterwards, I worked for a couple of different companies to develop business. Among others, I worked for my two own companies. I have always worked in special fields for mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, quality assurance for different industries such as shipyards, wind turbine industries and aviation.
This is the field I worked in for most of my time. So I started to gather experiences in NDT and in Structural Health Monitoring, which is very suitable to me because both have to do with electronics.
In 2019, I met Holger SPECKMANN, the managing director in Bremen. We had a long discussion and we decided to go the next years together, doing sales, business development and diversification for Testia.”
2) What is the main scope of your work at Testia?
So, as I said, it’s diversification, technical sales and business development. My main task is to realize the diversification, because we have a lot of nice tools, nice software, nice hardware, nice services. So, my role is to bring these experiences, what we have developed in aviation into other industries. This is the main task of every day. I’m very happy to do exactly this.
3) Do you have any memorable project or experience at Testia that you want to share with us?
Yes. Of course. As I said, I am responsible for diversification, so I will mention two. The first one is in the field of Structural Health Monitoring. The other one will be in the field of 3D measurement.
So first, when I started at Testia, I started, not as a sales guy but more as an application engineer for Structural Health Monitoring. I did this together with our brilliant colleague in Structural Health Monitoring, Aswin Harridas. Aswin is very good in working in the field of Structural Health Monitoring. He develop different systems but that we bring on different components. And we acquired one, let me say, good order in the wind turbine industry to monitor data for the wind turbine itself and its rotor blades. So we see the data every day, and it works. So we are happy! And the other one is 3D measurement. You can imagine that if you have jigs and tools over a long period of time, maybe 20 years, you will get a couple of deviations, every day. So it’s very little but over 20 years, you will have a bigger deviation. the old technical drawings, the old cut models are not very suitable to the current situation. So we are able to do a 3D scanning. We have a brilliant guy, a brilliant colleague, Till Herbord. He is very good in this. He is creating a step file afterwards, and you can exactly take this step file to create CATIA cut models. This is great, based on the Airbus structure. And afterwards you get the technical drawing. And this is a unique selling point of Testia. So it’s great. It’s a great advantage for us.
4) From your point of view, what is the most promising tool or service that Testia currently provides and why?
Let me combine this. So I’m responsible for diversification. I have mentioned two projects. It was both in different industries. A third one, that is very mentionable. We have a very special product in the aviation industry. It’s called NDTKit UT. It’s for analyzing UT data. So the team around Cédric here in Toulouse is doing a great job. We have this brilliant software on the other hand, but it’s more for the aviation industry. and we acquired a task from a company out of the wind turbine industry or in that case, from the blade industry. And he customized this software so far that we are able to analyze data in this world as well. I’m absolutely convinced about this software. And we have a product, we call it UE1 U for ultrasonic, E for Eddy current and 1 for a single probe. So we have a couple of different software onboard and one of the special software is clad, measuring clad. So, the big advantage of this software is that it is a go/no-go, red or green. We both can do this. Normally, you have to be very qualified in the different industries and in the aviation, very particularly. But, in that case, we can do this. So you don’t need any qualification to measure step by step. the cladding and believe me, it saves a lot of cost, a lot of time. So, people are very happy to have this tool and we are happy to sell it.
Watch the video interview on YouTube
Thanks for taking the time for this interview!
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