Opportunities aplenty in machine vision

Despite the manufacturing slump, DVT's chairman, Robert Steinke, reports strong revenue growth from solving challenges in automated inspection.

T&MW: How would you describe the state of the machine-vision industry?

Steinke: We've barely scratched the surface when it comes to the industry's potential. Any application in which human beings are doing the inspection is appropriate for the introduction of machine-vision technology. This will free people from a lot of very tedious tasks.

T&MW: What are the chief hurdles blocking the growth of machine vision?

Steinke: First, we need to build more intelligence into machine-vision systems and make them easier to use. Lighting in many industrial settings is another concern, and the answer here may be to develop technologies that incorporate elements of night vision. Finally, keeping costs under control and constantly striving for better performance at competitive prices are essential.

T&MW: Yet despite these obstacles, your company has enjoyed remarkable growth.

Steinke: We have experienced several years of rapid growth. Last year, we grew by 31% and are on track to grow revenues by 50% this year. Fueling this growth is the introduction of 25 new hardware products and three major software releases in the last decade. We always strive to introduce these new products at the beginning of the year to take full benefit of the innovations. We plan for a product lifecycle of 12 to 15 months for our cameras, but we always support our older products and make our new releases compatible with our existing product lines.

As an incubator company from Georgia Tech, we've been able to call on leading professors from that institution who bring us into research projects with leading companies. They are our eyes to the future. We also have been fortunate to hire for our own in-house R&D and application engineering staff some of the brightest Georgia Tech graduates, many with master's degrees and doctorates.

T&MW: What are some of the other tools that DVT considers essential in dealing with your customers?

Steinke: Education is a cornerstone to everything we do. Last year, we provided 10,000 man days of free machine-vision training to distributors, system integrators, customers, and strategic partner companies. This includes on-site training, Web-based chat rooms, nine online training programs per week, and our "Virtual Tour" CD, which condenses four full days of training and has been translated into seven languages. We also require every one of our distributors to offer their customers two free training sessions every month. Soon, we will award continuing education credits through a new training program with an Atlanta area college.

T&MW: Is there anything special about your corporate culture that contributes to your success?

Steinke: We're a privately held company with no short or long-term debt and $10 million in working capital. Our employees qualify for stock options, and they subscribe to a concept that I call servant leadership. We put our customer needs before our own. If a customer has a problem, we fix it—either online with our remote diagnostic tools or by putting someone on a plane at no charge to the customer. As another example, the directors of our 20 field offices around the world, together with appropriate distributors, use regular online machine-vision forums that often bring together several of a customer's plants. At DVT, our customer support is absolutely unconditional.