Obsessed with quality – the details

Many people ridicule us Germans for being so meticulous and detail-oriented – millions of practitioners love us for it!

We live and breathe quality. In everything that we do: every product we make. Every lens we polish. Every screw we tighten. Every optic fiber we bundle. Quality is always at the forefront of our minds, every single day.

The durability of our instruments is legendary. Every single instrument is the result of decades of product development, continuous improvements, production and a 100 % quality control in our own facilities. We thoroughly ensure that our high expectations of quality are maintained.

That way we also ensure that our claim for our high-end products – that they allow for “the most accurate diagnosis, as early as possible” – is also met.

No more, no less. 

Think global. Produce local.

All HEINE instruments – otoscopes, laryngoscopes, loupes, lights, ophthalmoscopes, dermatoscopes, sphygmomanometers and more – are fully manufactured in Germany, on our premises in Gilching, south of Munich. And we will continue with our local manufacturing efforts in future too.

Just over 90% of vendor parts come from Germany. Indeed, 45% come from Bavaria and southern Germany. We even develop and manufacture the control electronics for our lithium-ion batteries and LED^HQ ourselves on site.

This has the additional welcome benefit that we save ourselves transport costs and cut back on the amount of harmful emissions released into the environment.

We prefer to rely on ourselves.

One of the most important cornerstones of our corporate philosophy is our high level of vertical integration. From the idea to the finished product, all relevant work steps are performed in-house, i.e. directly on HEINE’s premises.

For example, all products are developed and perfected in our own Research and Development Department.

Then, in our Tool and Mould Construction Department, we design and manufacture injection moulds, as well as the tools required for the manufacturing process.

In Plastics Production, we produce housing parts and the tips for our otoscopes and, in our in-house electroplating plant, we coat and refine a multitude of metallic components.

The next step is Optics Production.

When it comes to quality, we really do split hairs.

Our lenses, for example, are manufactured in our very own Optics Production Department that combines German craftsmanship with state-of-the-art CNC-controlled machines.

Many of the lenses are manufactured with an accuracy of +/- 0.0001 mm, which is 20 times less than the diameter of a human hair.

Incidentally, in the Optics Department alone, more than 26,000 lenses, mirrors and other optical components are manufactured every month. So our name – HEINE Optotechnik – is no coincidence.

The human hand – the world’s finest tool.

Once we have personally manufactured our products’ key components, it is time to assemble them. And in this respect, we are still a genuine manufacturing firm in many areas. The assembly involves a great deal of very intricate manual work that requires many hours of training and a great deal of experience. We have a few employees who – after years of practice – can pull the fibre-optic bundles consisting of up to 6,000 individual fibres into a blade without breaking a single one. We check each blade afterwards to make sure the process was successful – just to be on the safe side. But you probably would not have expected anything else from us.

We love innovation. Especially when it proves beneficial to our users.

Oliver Heine puts it this way:

“For us it is not necessarily important to be the first with a new development. But we are always the ones that optimally implement new technologies for their application and the diagnosis. We do of course evaluate many new technologies intensively, often very early in their development, but only use them in our instruments when they bring sustainable benefits to the user. Innovation means for us to use new technologies in such a way, that they offer additional value for the doctor and the application. We make no compromises.“

Our instruments last as long as you would expect. Only longer.

Delivering the same performance as on day one – even after many years of daily use. This is not the exception; it’s the rule with our instruments. And the already legendary durability has three very welcome benefits for our users.

Sustainable right from the start.

HEINE has been one step ahead since moving to its new building in Gilching, south of Munich, in June 2020.

One major goal was to avoid the use of fossil fuels at our new site and cut electricity consumption by 70%. That’s why, for example, the entire building is cooled in summer by a groundwater source heat pump and heated in winter by recovering energy from the waste heat that our machines generate. Greenery covers almost half of the site, as well as the roof.

So the building might look snow-white, but in actual fact it is green.

We live for quality. Sometimes, unfortunately, the weekend gets in our way.