On September 16, Hans Beckhoff received the 2025 German Mechanical Engineering Award (Preis Deutscher Maschinenbau) at the 15th German Mechanical Engineering Summit (Deutscher Maschinenbau-Gipfel), held in Berlin. This follows on Hans Beckhoff being presented with the Rudolf Diesel Medal in July this year.
Hans Beckhoff, founder and Managing Director of Beckhoff Automation, has been presented with the 2025 German Mechanical Engineering Award for pioneering entrepreneurial achievement in automation and control technology.
The German Mechanical Engineering Award has been presented by the Produktion trade journal since 2006 and honours entrepreneurs who have set standards in machine and system engineering, driven innovation, and taken on social responsibility. Hans Beckhoff, founder and Managing Director of Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG, won the award in recognition of his pioneering, entrepreneurial achievements and numerous inventions.
The 15th German Mechanical Engineering Summit was held by the VDMA (Association of German Mechanical and Plant Engineering) and Produktion, a mi connect trade journal, in mid-September 2025, under the theme: ‘Manufacturing the future’. Top representatives from industry, research, and politics gathered to discuss industrial policy, the role of Europe, Germany as a business location, and the future of production. The award ceremony, which honours entrepreneurs for their life's work, was the highlight of the first evening.
PC-based control as a foundation
Hans Beckhoff's visionary work was presented as an example of how technological progress can be achieved responsibly. He was one of the first to use standard PCs to control machinery and systems in order to replace proprietary approaches with open, flexible, IT-based solutions. Beckhoff launched the first PC-based controller on the market in 1986. Since then, the company has regularly set new technological milestones, including the Lightbus, the first optical industrial fieldbus, in 1989, and modular bus terminals six years later that remain the industry standard today. In 2003, Beckhoff created EtherCAT, real-time Ethernet that also became established as a global standard. In 2011, the company presented the XTS, a multi-mover linear drive system; the XPlanar planar motor system for intelligent product transport followed in 2018. The MX-System is one of the company's latest technological innovations. It enables control cabinet-free automation of machinery and systems. TwinCAT control and engineering software is at the core of Beckhoff automation. This standard automation platform enables all the functions of a machine – from sequence and motion control to integrated measurement and analysis, along with motion control for machinery and robots, through to image processing and artificial intelligence.
Advancing mechanical engineering
The combination of hardware and software that Beckhoff provides allows mechanical engineers to build optimised production systems, which thus conserve resources. Its technologies provide the IT world with open interfaces, real-time communication, and integrate edge and cloud services. The Beckhoff approach couples IT and automation, which helps to boost sustainability and efficiency in industrial processes. "With the PC-based control technology concept, Hans Beckhoff made a critical contribution that paved the way into the digital age for mechanical engineering. Most importantly, his contribution was practical, rather than purely theoretical. The concept is one of: standard hardware, open interfaces, maximum flexibility. This was completely liberating for many mechanical engineers, particularly in the SME sector," said Claus Wilk, Editor-in-Chief of Produktion and laudator.
Technology and humanity
The jury was made up of specialist representatives from science and publishing, including Professor Günther Schuh (Managing Director of the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) of RWTH Aachen University), Thomas Bauernhansl (Executive Director of Fraunhofer IPA), and publishing representatives including Stefan Waldeisen, COO, and Stefan Weinzierl and Claus Wilk, Editors-in-Chief. They were impressed by Beckhoff's outstanding entrepreneurial achievements and praised his commitment to improving society and his philosophy that technology and humanity are not mutually exclusive. Wilk described the Beckhoff company as one that unites people, “with technology, with values, and with its ethos". To this day, Hans Beckhoff's main priority in managing his company is trust. This has resulted in a culture in which people treat each other as equals: "You have built a company, and you have created a space where thinking is encouraged, where ideas are allowed to grow, and where people count," said Wilk.
For more information visit: www.beckhoff.com