A working environment for developing and implementing good ideas is not only enjoyable but also contributes to success.
With our innovations, we ensure new service offers, improved business processes, a digital information flow and even more customer-oriented service. Innovativeness has therefore always been writ large at WESSLING and is fostered by the annual presentation of the WESSLING Innovation Award for the best ideas from the workforce.
The WESSLING Innovation Award prizewinners
Formulating forward-looking, innovative ideas and implementing them in the company - this was put into practice, this year, by many colleagues in the international WESSLING Group. To make a preselection of the twelve most promising ideas from a plentiful pool of inventive and expertise entries submitted for this year's WESSLING Innovation Award, was anything but easy for the jury.
The jury consisted of an internal team of experts, which is made up of several specialist disciplines from various WESSLING countries. The five finalists were then chosen during a further selection round. With such a treasure trove of good, progressive ideas, this selection did not proceed without lively professional discourse.
The path to the final round of the Top 5 innovation ideas thereby involved several quality tests in which the concepts were put through their paces. All participants have shown through their innovative work that they are constantly striving to make important contributions to the optimisation of laboratory analyses and consulting, customer service and internal processes. Innovative ideas continue to be the driving force behind the company's success and an excellent example of the fact that WESSLING is a living, learning company in the truest sense of the word.
The three 2022 WESSLING Innovation Award winners were then selected from the five finalists in an exciting online awards ceremony. An online meeting for the live voting, which included seventy colleagues from seven countries, provided a great setting for this. The award ceremony was presented with great enthusiasm and verve by shareholder and Corporate Innovation Manager Julia Weßling, and Arkadiusz Król, Managing Director of WESSLING Polska. The three winning ideas were voted by all viewers in a live exciting head-to-head race.
The award winners were: Sébastien Morel and Mathieu Noirault, WESSLING France, with their topic “3D printing for small parts of laboratory supplies”. The two colleagues from the Lyon location presented a practical application for using 3-D printers to produce individual parts as required in laboratory operations. Another award went to the innovation “Microplastics in a new light” created by Sven Simons and Markus Rhode from Bochum, WESSLING Germany. Their project involves the further development of an analytical method for microplastics that promises faster and more cost-effective results than with the methods currently in use. The third Award 2022 went to Damian Martyna‘s entry, “Automated station for weighing bulk material ”, from WESSLING Polska. This innovation by our colleague from the Krakow site also deals with automation which strives to reduce the amount of monotonous manual work that our colleagues currently undertake.
Congratulations to all winners!
The WESSLING Innovation Award prizewinners
Inspiring atmosphere at the WESSLING Innovation Award 2021 ceremony: this year's event was again full of interesting conversations, new ideas and was crowned by the awarding of the five innovation award winners. Colleagues from eight WESSLING countries took part in this year's award ceremony, which was again held digitally.
Damian Martyna from the Krakow site in Poland convinced the audience with his idea of partially automating the chromatography process. By inserting a robotic arm into the workflow, he was able to reduce the manual steps and thus potential sources of error, while at the same time increasing the capacity of this method.
Another award went to Mathieu Noirault and Robin T'Jampens from the Lyon branch in France. The two developed an application for the administration and organisation of consumables, schedules and the laboratory team. For this purpose, they created a web application to easily process and monitor data.
Peter Andersch from the WESSLING site in Münster received the award for the Cannabis Test Kit. His innovation is based on the discrimination of the cannabinoids CBD and THC by a colour reaction. The test kit can be used as a quick test to check the identity of CBD and/or THC. This test is requested by pharmacies, for example. The test kit can reliably identify the individual substances CBD or THC as well as the identification of both substances in CBD/THC mixtures. The test kit was developed in connection with the bachelor thesis of Kai Ordon.
Congratulations to the winners from all colleagues!
The award ceremony took place digitally for the second time due to the restrictions imposed by COVID-19. The innovations of the colleagues, who had gone through a multi-stage selection process beforehand, were presented in impressive videos during the award ceremony. Afterwards, they provided the inquisitive auditorium with well-founded answers.
The WESSLING Innovation Award is meant to be a signal: WESSLING is an international group, together each individual makes a very important contribution to the service portfolio for the benefit of our customers. Quality, safety, health and the environment have always been the pillars on which our services are based.
As a colourful conclusion to the digital award ceremony, a great edited video with small impressions of the last months from the WESSLING countries was shown. A small, but emotionally moving, thank you to the entire staff in times when personal meetings could usually not take place.
The WESSLING Innovation Award prizewinners
Innovation was present in every respect at this year's presentation of the WESSLING Innovation Award, which is endowed with 10,000 euros, as not only did the award-winning ideas radiate with the innovative power of WESSLING, but also the award ceremony itself. The event reflected the belief that in challenging times we may need to rethink the way we operate and do business.
Péter Lovászi from the WESSLING location in Budapest convinced the jury with his innovation to improve laboratory processes. His idea of a new cleaning process for laboratory vessels reduces the amount of solvent vapours in the ambient air, and thereby not only improves air quality but also saves time and money.
Another award went to Dr Judith Scharte from the German WESSLING location in Altenberge and Dr Adrienn Micsinai from WESSLING Budapest. During their international cooperation they developed new analysis methods to detect viruses on surfaces, in food and in environmental samples. This method enables WESSLING to support customers in assessing the effectiveness of hygiene measures, for example, in schools or slaughterhouses. Identifying potential risks in good time helps customers to prevent the spread of viruses.
Gábor Bordós, who is also with WESSLING Hungary, received the award for validating a microplastics sampling system that can be used to determine, more precisely, where the ideal sampling depth in water bodies lies. This is important in order to obtain exact values for the concentration of microplastics for the analysis that follows. This innovation can be seen as the company's response to increasing customer requests for analysis and sampling of microplastics in water bodies.
“An innovation is more than just a good idea”, Julia Wessling, shareholder and innovation manager at WESSLING, emphasises. On selecting ideas for the award, the jury attaches great importance to the fact that it is a technical or organisational innovation that also fully convinces in terms of implementation. This objective is achieved by responding to customer needs and recognising trends in good time, which is an important continuous process for leading a company into a strong and healthy future. This spirit of innovation is firmly anchored in the corporate culture of WESSLING and is specifically promoted by various internal processes, such as an Innovation Management System. “We advise customers from a wide range of sectors and are known to them as problem solvers, and as a company that provides flexible and innovative answers to new questions. We therefore attach great importance to a targeted promotion of innovations”, says Julia Wessling.
The WESSLING Innovation Award prizewinners
The winners of the grand innovation prize of the WESSLING Group have been announced. For the twelfth time now, the consulting and analysis company has honoured the pioneering ideas of its employees. This time four ideas originated from Germany and France convinced the jury to rant the WESSLING Innovation Award, which is endowed with 10,000 Euro.
One coveted award went to chemist Siema Lange and chemical laboratory technician Jonas Holtgreve for their outstanding work on measuring microplastics caused by tyre abrasion during the research project “Tyre abrasion in the environment“ (RAU). With laboratory analyses and expertise in microplastics, WESSLING is one of Europe's leading companies in the field.
Chemist André Schmitz has pioneered new methods for the laboratory measurement of emissions using 3D printers, and has also been among the winners of the WESSLING Innovation Award for this development. WESSLING is one of the few laboratories working in this sector. Based on this knowledge, customers receive comprehensive advice and can optimise 3D printers for their business and customers.
Together with his colleagues Rolf Bögeholz, Steffen Sommer and Holger Weingärtner from engineering and consulting services, André Schmitz has been part of another customer-oriented innovation. By using 3D design technology for the 3D printing of terrain models, the potential challenges of the subsoil, and the resulting costs for the customer, can be better identified in advance. Anna Weßling, managing partner of the WESSLING Group, was impressed: “It is a great pleasure for me that this innovation has been developed for our customers by our employees across business units. This is a good example that focuses on our customers, because they can in turn convince their customers with our innovation.”
Another idea was honoured during the ceremony in Budapest: the innovation created by colleagues from WESSLING France, at the Lyon location, benefits both the laboratory technicians at the workplace and the customers. Francis Bourdon, Fabienne Loisel, Sabrina Slimani and Audrey Goutagnieux designed a new vacuum filter system for preparing soil samples. New funnels were made by a glass manufacturer and they built the system themselves. This innovation considerably accelerates sample preparation time and facilitates work in the laboratory. Fifty additional samples can be filtered daily to provide customers with faster results.
The winners were also able to celebrate their wealth of ideas during a sightseeing tour of the Danube city; a private organ concert had been arranged for them in the magnificent St. Stephen's Basilica, as well as a tasting in the Chocolate Museum.
The WESSLING Innovation Award prizewinners
Faster, more precise, safer – the jury of the WESSLING Innovation Award 2018 was impressed by a new detection method for legionella that takes just a few hours. The international analysis and consulting service provider awarded a total of 10,000 euro to the best four innovations at this year's award ceremony in the LWL Museum for Art and Culture.
“Most recently, they said German companies ran out of ideas. We do not see this trend at WESSLING ", says Florian Weßling, managing shareholder. The company attaches great importance to an innovative spirit – and”, states Weßling, “good ideas don't always depend on the budget. Often it is the small improvements that give our customers and our services decisive advantages.“
“The company promotes this innovation climate through flat hierarchies, direct communication channels and close interdisciplinary cooperation. This lived innovation culture is our motivation and important to stay fit for the future," says Florian Weßling. Much of what was a vision yesterday is already part of our everyday life today, but may be outdated tomorrow. The winners convinced the jury with their innovations in the areas of food safety, environment and digitalisation:
Marian Górowiec from Poznan has developed an important tool for food testing: with its new calculator, the Acute Reference Dose (ARfD), i.e. the maximum permissible level of pesticide residues in feed, can now be calculated in around 30 minutes and thus three times as fast. Customers from the food industry have this value checked regularly in the WESSLING laboratories in order to comply with the strict controls for consumer protection.
Thanks to the innovation of Dagmar Braeker, Marius Kerkhoff and Dr Judith Scharte from Münster, the company is "first on the market" with a new legionella detection method. It helps, above all, customers who remediated due to legionella infestation, e.g. in recooling plants, or who used biocides to combat bacteria. The new detection method provides them with information within a few hours of receiving samples in the laboratory as to whether the measures have taken effect – until now, this has taken several days.
Adrienn Tolokán from Hungary receives the WESSLING Innovation Award 2018 for her anti-plastic campaign in kindergartens and primary schools. With a painting competition, waste collection campaigns on rivers and short films, she initiated an intensive dialogue – also with parents and teachers – on environmental protection and sustainability. A commitment that already won the CSR Hungary Award in Hungary. Micro plastic is currently one of the major topics of the WESSLING experts. They contribute their know-how to various European research projects.
The Hungarian Krisztián Somogyi developed a digital interface between customer and laboratory in the sense of the "Internet of things". The complete online monitoring by the measuring device means a significant plus in quality assurance.
The WESSLING Innovation Award prizewinners
“The best and most sustainable innovations result from a company constantly putting every process to the test”, says Florian Weßling. “This is why our employees can and should develop new ideas in their daily working life at any time.
“We are a learning company, in which our employees are highly motivated in improving our processes, products and services”, Dr Erwin Weßling, founder of the family business, adds in describing the basis of innovations at WESSLING. “Every employee sees himself as a solution finder and in doing so always keeps an eye on our customers’ needs. This is how our colleagues decisively contribute to our success.” In order to increase its innovation power, the company also engages in cooperation with universities and technical colleges, participates in research and development projects and collaborates in DIN and technical committees.
For the tenth time now, this innovation culture has found visible expression in the WESSLING Innovation Award, honouring employees from France, Hungary and Germany during a ceremony in Kraków in Poland. This year, the award was presented at a highly symbolic site: the Collegium Maius of the Jagiellonian University, which was established in 1364 as the second oldest university in Europe and specialises in the natural sciences. Approximately 30 teams or individual employees had submitted their ideas for the prize endowed with a total of 10,000 euros. “We have 40 different professions in our company, half of them are natural scientists and engineers. This leads to many groups participating in the award being interdisciplinary in structure”, says Diana Weßling, spokeswoman of the Shareholder family. “So again and again, we dare to think outside the box, which makes all the difference.”
A good example for this is one of the winning teams. Quality Manager Natalie Ganzauer and the Laboratory Technicians Brian Patrick Morrison and Julius Pollhäne from the WESSLING site in Berlin have jointly developed a new method for a more efficient analysis of food and feedstuffs. For example, foodstuffs are tested for several hundreds, which are partially very instable pesticides. The laboratory colleagues cool and powder the starting material to obtain a homogeneous sample and later to be able to make a representative report. So far, the laboratories used solid carbon dioxide, commonly known as ‘dry ice’, which cools the product to about minus 78 degrees Celsius. The Berlin team searched for alternatives and tried liquid nitrogen. The process of cryogenic comminution, as it is called, achieves extremely low temperatures of minus 196 degrees Celsius. This now for the first time enables a more precise and faster identification of particularly unstable sulphur-containing pesticides: dithiocarbamates. The procedure is so innovative that the company works on including this new process in the EU Commission’s quality guidelines for pesticide analysis in food and feedstuffs.
Award winner Dr József Horgos focused on a very different topic. In his capacity as a so-called ‘Qualified Person’, he has a very special task at the site in Hungary. Whenever WESSLING analyses pharmaceutical products for companies and approves them for market release, reference samples have to be professionally stored for up to one year beyond their expire date. On average, this is three to six years, in which Horgos is responsible for making sure that the medication can be analysed again at any time, for example, in the event of complaints. So far, the pharmacist at the laboratory in Budapest only had space for 200 samples, which was by no means sufficient. nowhere near enough. Therefore József Horgos has developed a specially secured cabinet that can be stacked on pallets in a special service provider’s high rack warehouse; if necessary, up to 2,000 pallets and around 112,000 samples can be stored in this way. Moreover, the warehouse fulfils all guidelines regarding temperature and humidity and is only accessible only to authorised personnel. Last, but not least, this also reduces the storage costs, which in turn benefits the WESSLING customers.
At WESSLING France, Head of IT Paul-Louis Curtaud and software developer Maxime Lerbret have contributed their knowledge to optimise test chamber tests that measure the emissions released by building materials in interior spaces. The tests take place in about 50 chambers which must have clearly defined climatic conditions around the clock for 28 days. So far, the laboratory employees had to be constantly on site to monitor the humidity and temperature. The two award winners have now installed USB thermometers and hygrometer sensors that can be read remotely from any site by remote control. The probes are moreover used within a network, which saves physical computers and therefore space and costs. At the same time, the system provides more security because data loss is excluded, for instance, if the software on one computer is damaged. Paul-Louis Curtaud and Maxime Lerbret have additionally developed a programme that automatically saves the measured data every ten minutes.
WESSLING’s work is often complex and thus not easy to convey to others. Experts therefore often have to go into more detail hen presenting their expertise at the WESSLING Academy and numerous external events. Dr Peter Andersch, Technical Director of Laboratories at the Münster site, has found a way to present scientific contexts in a simple manner. In a technical lecture, he provides an introduction into complex topics such as physical and chemical interactions in an amusing and comprehensible manner and compares generics and original medicines In doing so, he uses a kind of representative: the ‘AnalyTiger’, a soft toy that provides more vividness and comprehensibility during the presentation. Andersch received praise and acknowledgement for his concept.
From the very foundation of WESSLING, we have been supporting our business partners' success on the market with our innovativeness. With our thriving culture of innovation, we are fit for the future.
Our close ties to customers are also a source of inspiration and provide us with important stimuli for innovations. Each year, a jury selects the best ideas for the WESSLING Innovation Award; a total of 10,000 euros in prizes is awarded.
„Innovations succeed with the appropriate framework conditions. At WESSLING, we therefore foster a working environment in which ideas are able to grow into specific service offers.“