Jungheinrich WMS and automated high bay warehouse, Mark Metallwarenfabrik GmbH
Quick and transparent material flow.
Mark Metallwarenfabrik GmbH was started almost 100 years ago as a producer of metal parts for the shoe industry. Today the family-run company works together with the automotive industry, medicine and electrical engineering, the construction industry and many other sectors. Its core area of expertise is the deep drawing of high-precision metal parts – many of which are for security functions. Annual production amounts to 2.3 billion precision parts.
Confined and cluttered warehouses
Mark, a company steeped in tradition, has grown rapidly. The expansion of production has, however, also resulted in a cramped warehouse. Pallets with parts or finished goods often had to be relocated five or six times. This also caused difficulties when recording and managing stock.
The intralogistics specialists at Jungheinrich proposed extending the warehouse with an automated pallet high bay warehouse. The Jungheinrich Warehouse Management System (WMS) was to be implemented as an overriding control system for all warehouse processes. After only a brief project planning phase, the realisation process began.
The requirement
Excellent performance in a limited space
Due to the tight conditions, pallets were constantly having to be relocated from production and for shipping. That not only wasted time for the Metallwarenfabrik staff, but also made it difficult to track and maintain an overview of stock. A new warehouse system needed to take all of this into account and operate with small space requirements.
The solution
High bays and intelligent software
Jungheinrich created a two-aisle, double-depth pallet high bay warehouse, with 4 pallet lines in each aisle linking to production and the existing manual warehouse. Two stacker cranes automate the storage and retrieval of stock, achieving high throughput speeds in the 78 m-long aisles of the 19 m-high automated warehouse. Pallets in the automated area are handed over and picked using two rail-guided roller transfer carriages. They act as powerful shuttles in the conveyor technology also supplied by Jungheinrich. The Jungheinrich Warehouse Management System (WMS) manages more than 5,000 pallet storage spaces in the manual and automated warehouse area. As the overriding software, it intelligently controls the entire material flow, optimises all of the warehouse processes, and ensures maximum efficiency and transparency. The modular structure and multidimensional configuration model offered by the Jungheinrich WMS ensures it can be easily adapted to any future changes.
The statement
One solution with many benefits
“We talked for a long time about whether an automated high bay warehouse was right for our size of company and whether this investment would be worth it for us. But now I can say that this is definitely the case, as it has made us faster and more efficient, but above all, improved our planning and precision. What’s more, we were previously very cramped, but now we have lots of space.”
