Dematic installs a Multishuttle warehouse in silo design for ZKW in Austria
The production areas at the ZKW site in Wieselburg were exhausted, while at the same time there was and is a steady increase in the number of components and variants, which means that the space requirement is increasing from year to year. That is why ZKW decided to build a new logistics centre and commissioned Dematic with the automation.
To make optimal use of the site‘s capacity, the intralogistics provider was to construct a customised Dematic Multishuttle warehouse in silo design with over 60,000 container storage locations, enabling space-saving multiple-deep storage of the headlight components.
The 80-metre-long, 20-metre-wide and 21-metre-high building complex provides a total of 62,000 storage spaces for containers, divided across five aisles of 28 levels each. 140 shuttles automatically access the containers and transport them directly to the workstations for palletisation as well as to incoming and outgoing goods.
Stefan Hauptmann, General Plant Manager at ZKW Lichtsysteme Wieselburg“Thanks to the new logistics centre, the entire flow of goods – from receipt to production – will in future be fully automated and will not require any additional storage or retrieval steps. It now takes just 15 minutes from the time the order for materials is placed at the assembly line until the required parts arrive.”
The transport system, which is around three kilometres long, enables up to 1,500 storage and retrieval operations per hour. Around 190 different types of container can be transported at a speed of up to 0.8 metres per second.
The two existing high-bay warehouses, the automated small parts warehouse, the quality control area, the module production, the empty container cellar and the incoming goods area are also connected. ‘The system saves us an enormous amount of space at the assembly line because it delivers the required parts fully automatically and on-demand,’ says Stefan Hauptmann, General Plant Manager at ZKW Lichtsysteme Wieselburg.
After a construction period of around one year, the new logistics centre has now been put into operation. The highly automated storage system on the former company car park guarantees a fast and efficient supply of materials for the entire production site. Since mid-October, further assembly lines have been connected to the new system every week. By the first quarter of 2022, all 28 production lines are to be linked to the logistics centre. The smart goods depot not only provides additional storage capacity, but also frees up former storage space as new production areas. ‘Thanks to the new logistics centre, the entire flow of goods – from receipt to production – will in future be fully automated and without additional storage and retrieval steps. It takes just under 15 minutes from ordering materials at the assembly line to the arrival of the required parts,’ says Hauptmann.
The new logistics centre has not only expanded storage capacity, but has also allowed former storage space to be converted into production areas. The construction and infrastructure were built by regional companies. The tight schedule and the connection of the logistics centre to the production plant were challenging. The task was solved with a seven-metre-high bridge over a railway line. Due to the limited space inside the production halls, a 100-metre-long external tunnel was built to ensure the supply of materials for the entire plant. ‘The aim for the future is to have a large proportion of the containers transported directly from the warehouse to the assembly line via the transport system,’ says Hauptmann.
Stefan Hauptmann, General Plant Manager at ZKW Lichtsysteme Wieselburg“The system saves us an enormous amount of space on the assembly line, as it delivers the required parts fully automatically and on-demand.”
About the customer
At its main plant, ZKW manufactures lighting systems for the automotive industry, producing around three million headlights per year according to its own figures, as well as numerous spare parts. In 2022, the group employed 10,000 people and generated a total turnover of 1.36 billion euros.