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| New Product Development |
In a couple of years, New Product Development in Bruges evolved from a supporting group to a pioneer-group. The first engineering steps were situated at the process-level : the development of the new products still took place in Statesville (USA), while Bruges was only a production plant.
This changed in 1985 with the foundation of the electronic controls group. The goal at that moment was to support the powershift transmission products for off-highway applications. The market (and mainly Scandinavia) was starting to show an interest in getting automatic shifting systems instead of normal gear shifting. Initially the group outsourced hardware and software, but in 1987 an own development was started based on the now very popular INTEL 80C51 microcontroller. The first product was called APC100, of which more than 7000 units were sold in over 300 different applications.
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The development of a low cost shift lever with built in direction change and overspeeding protection ('91) moved the controls design responsibility completely to Bruges. Now mechanical engineering made its move: The development of the T16000 transmission with improved shifting (due to electro-mechanical modulation) turned out to be a real success. Up till now more than 8000 units have been sold. Not much later the hydraulic and electronic control groups were merged, and as of then electronic clutch control systems were developed for the new off-highway transmissions. The responsibility of Bruges was expanded from controls design to full product development responsibility for some products.
Five years and the development of a whole range of new products and systems later (e.g. electronic inching combined with electronic throttle) we have world wide responsibility for transmissions in the off-highway industry. At this moment New Product Development consists of about 40 people and we are still in full expansion.
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