Christian Neumann

01.07.2020
2 min reading time

tapio climbs the next level

Within the last three years, tapio has successfully established itself in the market. We have gained thousands of customers and 41 business partners. You can say: Our goal of creating an open ecosystem for the wood industry has been achieved.

Essential for this was that there is a "place" where all business partners and customers such as furniture manufacturers or carpenters can interact and have reliable "rules of the game". Such a "place" is not attractive if there are no applications that use it. Just as it is annoying if you are the only person with a telephone. Therefore tapio has created some horizontal applications as beacons for the industry. These include tapio's MachineBoard and the ServiceBoard. Both are now well established and show very tangible benefits for customers and manufacturers when there is an open ecosystem in an industry.

The partners have not rested on tapio in the last three years, but have started to strengthen their digital competence. With Digital Factory, for instance, HOMAG has built up a strong and agile team that develops applications under the HOMAG brand, thereby enriching the entire tapio ecosystem. It is similar to a new development area: Once the sewerage system, roads and cables have been laid, the foundation is in place, but it is only with the houses (customers) and shops (business partners/providers) that the new development area becomes beautiful and lively. tapio has laid this foundation in recent years, offering solutions with a small "shop". The expansion of the new development area can now be driven forward better and faster by tapio partners with their industry know-how. Through the partners' expertise, more and more specific applications are currently being developed, which can generate significantly more value than tapio's lighthouses.

For tapio, it is now time to climb the next evolutionary step and focus its energy on the further development of the ecosystem. Various new applications require extended basics. Therefore, our future focus will be on the further development of the rules of interaction and the creation of the necessary technical building blocks. The new development area will thus be expanded by general "institutions" to promote business. Our successful tadamo model for securing data ownership forms the basis here, as we have successfully made the connection of machines ready for series production. Now it is a matter of strengthening the "data economy" in a fairway.


Following the move to HOMAG by Matthias Volm, who has since been strengthening the Edge BU there, Julian Spöcker will, in future be supporting the Sales and Service division at HOMAG, from where he will be using his digital expertise to drive forward the further expansion of the new development area.

Over the past three years, Julian has been heavily involved in the creation and development of tapio. In particular, he has been able to drive forward the partner network and tapio applications with his industry know-how and affinity for service.

We wish Julian good luck with his new job. Julian will continue to work closely with tapio and will now help to shape our shared goal of "digitalizing the wood industry" from the HOMAG side.

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