Fifty years and ready for the future

In the first half century of its existence, Interflow developed from a supplier of flow cabinets to an integral designer and builder of cleanrooms, ORs and flow cabinets with in-house manufacturing. The company from Wieringerwerf is also market leader in the field of customer-specific laminar air flow units and validation and quality measurements of ORs and cleanrooms. The anniversary year of 2024 will not pass without important developments, says managing director Niels Höfte.

"2024 is a special year in three for Interflow," begins Höfte. "We are celebrating our 50th anniversary, introduced the enthusiastically received ninth generation of our laminar air flow line, and have expanded our plant and made it suitable for the advancing industrialization of construction. On the one hand, we are still the inventors of product innovations; on the other hand, we are anticipating developments such as a shorter "time to market", further sustainability of the entire chain and the shortage in the labor market with substantial investments. We are achieving this with an expanded and transformed production location, which will be up and running by September 2024. Among other things, robotization and automation will enable us to quadruple our, now CO2 neutral, production capacity."

Modular construction system

Interflow offers a flexible integrated and modular construction system for ORs and clean rooms. Based on prefabricated, easily cleanable plug-and-play wall sections, which can be installed at the last minute and have all built-in facilities integrated, for equipment such as monitors, stoves and scales. Höfte: "Our modular system has a number of fixed basic elements. Based on individual user demand, custom components in the 'flex layer' can be filled in, allowing optimal user requirements to be met. Each component is digitally provided with all possible variables - in a full BIM environment, so that we can fully render a design or design change in 3D in a very short time, including costs, production files and drawings."

"There is no other party in the market that can offer the integral consulting, design and construction process of ORs and clean rooms, including validation and maintenance, completely in-house," continued Höfte. "With the guarantee of integral design responsibility and quality. 'Guaranteed in control,' we call that. Interflow has the only working operating room in the Netherlands outside a hospital, a showcase of the various possibilities of our building system. We are used to working to the highest standards: both in the pharmaceutical industry and in high-tech, such as the world of semiconductors, people are already very far with the modular construction of clean rooms."

Shorter design and construction time

These markets have been growing very fast in recent years, which has also meant that the design and construction or introduction time of cleanrooms has had to be shortened. Thanks in part to modular techniques like those of Interflow, this is succeeding, says Höfte. "Steps are being made through collaboration in the chain. We now see this reflected at hospitals as well: a lot of time and energy is invested in the design phase of ORs; together we can win that back with fast, modular construction. It was nice to see, that at our anniversary event, customers from healthcare, the high-tech world and the pharmaceutical industry met. This led to such an enthusiastic response that we are thinking of organizing this type of meeting more often. We can learn a lot from each other."