The AI Impact Award, presented by the German business newspaper manager magazin and Porsche Consulting, honors companies that successfully and effectively apply artificial intelligence in real-world practice. The award highlights solutions that create genuine economic and societal added value.
Dorfner has been nominated for the AI Impact Award 2026 in the Production and Supply Chain category. This category honors solutions that make processes across production, logistics, or the supply chain more efficient, safer, or more sustainable. In a short interview, Mirko Mondan, Managing Director of Dorfner, explains the challenges his team faced, how the AI-based approach was developed, and which results are already visible today.
Mr. Mondan, what technical or process-related challenges pushed traditional recipe development for industrial coatings to its limits?
Supply bottlenecks, skilled labor shortages, raw material constraints, energy and sustainability requirements, and constantly changing regulations all demand increasingly flexible formulations. Traditional recipe development, however, is too slow to meet these demands. From planning and testing to the final adjusted formulation, the process often takes weeks and ties up valuable laboratory capacity. As a result, the response to changing market conditions is simply too sluggish – leading to missed opportunities.