Value engineering plays a central role in Hittech’s relationship with the customer

In 2012 ASML asked Marco Verloop and Koen Mentink to come to Veldhoven and share their vision on 3D metal printing. The Hittech directors made an agreement beforehand: at a strategic moment during Verloop’s presentation, Mentink would place a 3D part on the table.

At Hittech, you see, they’d been thinking for a while about no longer machining a part known as the E-Box, but rather printing the part using additive manufacturing techniques. They’d already talked about it with ASML before. To Verloop and Mentink, 3D seemed to be the obvious way, given the numerous cooling channels that were hard to create through machining – but it had never quite gotten the go-ahead. Hittech decided to invest in a special pilot project to convince its customer.