Festive mood during the ceremonial key handover for The SUMMIT

After about a year and six months, the building project The SUMMIT in the Siegen industrial estate Martinshardt was completed in record time.

At The SUMMIT, hardware, sensors, software and IT competencies are concentrated which is rarely the case at one location. This enables innovation because today's technical developments are multi-dimensional. The Siegen division is therefore an important element in ifm's digitisation strategy. The ifm group of companies develops, produces and sells sensors, controllers and systems for industrial automation world-wide and is one of the market leaders in this sector. The Siegen location is the software and technology location within the ifm group. In March, pmdtechnolgies ag and ifm solutions gmbh with their subsidiaries GIB, ifm services gmbh and ifm software gmbh started working at The SUMMIT. Other companies call The SUMMIT their home on time for the opening. This includes Hill GmbH and Medocs GmbH as well as ifm's shareholdings statmath GmbH and Virtual Retail GmbH.

"The Summit is technically well equipped", says Nadine Rahman. The building has its own computing centre with an oxygen reduction system and its own emergency power supply system. At such a high-tech site, an appropriate internet connection is a must and so there is a high-availability and high-performance connection to the "web". The currently 300 employees can enjoy their own canteen and gym. Besides altogether 450 available work places, there are state-of-the-art measuring laboratories, clean-room laboratories, a conference centre and shopfloors. A car park with almost 300 spaces directly behind the building and their own bus stop provide an uncomplicated start in the working day. The SUMMIT provides the ideal possibilities for future top performances in the fields of IT, Industry 4.0 and sensor technology.

"The SUMMIT brings a dash of Silicon Valley to Siegen", states Dr Bernd Buxbaum, Chairman of the Board of Directors of pmdtechnologies ag. There are also good connections to the Siegen university thanks to research co-operations, such as with the centre for digitisation of economy and the centre for sensor systems. Furthermore, there are colleagues at The SUMMIT who are connected with the university via a "dual studies". The idea and the hope behind The SUMMIT are to create a high-technology centre in the Siegen area radiating into the region and beyond.

To ensure that the success story of The SUMMIT can now start to be written depends in particular on the successful construction by the Siegen building contractor Otto Quast who have set up the building in record time staying within the limits of the cost level. The imposing building was designed by the Hamburg architects nentwig.notbohm Architekten. KÖLBLKRUSE from Essen did the project management for the construction works.