UhrTeil AG: Trust Tempered by Time, Collaborating to Calibrate the Source of Precision

In 1950s Switzerland, the precision watchmaking industry was thriving, but hidden concerns lurked in its supply chain. In a family workshop in Biel, the young UhrTeil AG supplied miniature gears to top watchmakers. While their craftsmanship was highly regarded, subtle differences between batches of parts remained a bottleneck restricting their growth.

The core problem lay in a seemingly simple link — inspection. At that time, the industry generally relied on the eyes and experience of master craftsmen. This manual standard, though artistic, could hardly meet the strict consistency requirements of the industrial era. UhrTeil’s founders knew well that without standardizing the inspection process, the company would forever be confined to workshop scale, unable to gain long-term trust from top brands.

At this crucial period when UhrTeil sought a breakthrough, Heinrich Johannes Schmid, founder of HMS, visited with a fledgling modular concept. Instead of offering complex automated solutions, we focused on the most fundamental issue of "benchmarks." The cooperation between HMS and UhrTeil began with co-designing a simple yet revolutionary optical comparator and standard inspection process. This system not only controlled the inspection error of key dimensions to the micron level but also quantified and solidified the master craftsmen’s experience into inheritable objective standards.

This cooperation brought a qualitative leap in UhrTeil’s delivery quality. With unprecedented stability, they successfully became a certified supplier to several top watchmakers. More importantly, this cooperation laid the corporate gene of "data-driven precision" for UhrTeil AG, paving the way for its future leadership in the precision transmission field.

HMS’s Insight: True industrialization starts with unified measurement standards.

At the starting point of precision manufacturing, the most valuable support is not replacing craftsmanship, but establishing replicable benchmarks for outstanding experience — making trust measurable and transferable ever since.

Is your enterprise also exploring to establish industry standards? We look forward to working with you to define the scale of excellence from the foundation up.