HYGIENIC ENGINEERING & DESIGN IN PRACTICE
ENGINEERING CLEANABILITY EHEDG AND GEA: TWO GROUPS, ONE MINDSET What’s GEA’s secret to global success? The company group offers practical solutions for many industry challenges and manages to pull it off with smart process engineering and demanddriven product development. Other companies do likewise you say? How then did GEA become a leading supplier in so many global industries? Ulf Thiessen, Head of Flow Components & Homogenizer Sales at GEA Germany, believes that it’s the innovation-oriented development strategy that sets GEA apart. Thiessen points out that this ‘optimization-by-innovation’ mindset was also why GEA was one of the first company members to become part of the EHEDG community twenty-seven years ago. Now, Thiessen enters the EHEDG Connects stage with a proposal. Is it an offer we can’t refuse?
What’s the proposal? Ulf Thiessen: “I’ll come to that shortly, but let me start by saying that the value of the EHEDG value proposition has changed over the last couple of years. Ten years ago, we still made good use of EHEDG expertise to develop our hygienic design product line. It started with the guidelines on the basic components that slowly evolved into more complex and process-oriented guidelines. By that time we had developed our own hygienic design standards and started implementing them in our projects. In the past couple of years we had less use for the equipment
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documents but more so for the process and engineeringoriented guidelines. This shift makes EHEDG even more valuable than before for GEA because engineering is what connects all processes of our customers and determines the food safety of the design.” It all happens in engineering? “Yes, because you can implement as many hygienic materials and vigorous cleaning regimes as you want, but if the initial engineering of components is not done in line with hygienic engineering guidelines, the cleanability
