Industry News

With the excavations having started back in July 2022 to build a new automated high-bay warehouse for Würth Industrie Service, which will include 59,000 additional storage spaces covering more than 4,000m², the company is now firmly set on commissioning the new facility and machines in April this year.

The Würth Industrial Park in Drillberg, Germany, is considered one of the most advanced logistics centres for industrial supply in Europe, with over 65,000m² (equivalent to about nine football fields) devoted to the secure supply of production resources, as well as auxiliary and operating materials, for around 20,000 customers. 

The park offers modern, fully automated, high-bay and shuttle warehouses with a capacity of more than 650,000 storage locations, which include 34km of conveyor system, autonomous bin shuttles, camera inspection systems, as well as self-learning robots. All of this has the goal, according to the company, of ensuring optimised workplace ergonomics, as well as a sustainably healthy way of working – by taking over physically stressful tasks through this increased level of automation and digitalisation. 

In order to ensure the long-term supply security for all customers across Europe, and to support its growing product range of currently 1.4 million items, Würth Industrie Service is constantly investing in further warehouse capacity expansion. With its new high-bay warehouse, which is 50m high, 34m wide, 121m long, it has expanded its capacity by 59,000 additional pallet-storage spaces – increasing the overall
high-bay capacity at the Bad Mergentheim location by about 33% to 235,000 pallet storage spaces in total. 

With its silo type shelving system completed, three of six SRMs have been brought in. Over an aisle length of 120m, the rail-guided vehicles will now take over the fully automated storage and retrieval of pallets in the warehouse. They will operate in six aisles with a maximum travel speed of 180m/min and a lifting speed of up to 70m/min. Each SRM has two telescopic forks as load handling attachments, with a total load capacity of approximately 2,400kg. The 46m high SRMs are particularly economical on space thanks to their single column design, and can carry out up to 600 pallet movements per hour – using their two load handling attachments.  

Helmut Eisenkolb, head of logistics at Würth, commented: “With the new high-bay warehouse, we are realising dimensions that rarely exist in this overall complexity. The logistical expansion will, thus, significantly increase the efficiency and capacity in the entire value added process.”

The SRMs are from Kardex, an expert in the field of intralogistics solutions and leading provider of automated storage solutions and material flow systems. Lars Wagner, project manager, operations new business refurbishment at Kardex MLOG Logistics, explained: “In a project of this magnitude, it is always impressive to see so many experts, with a wide range of expertise, acting as one big unit in the shortest possible time. In order to safely transport the SRMs from Kardex’s production site in Neuenstadt am Kocher to Bad Mergentheim by heavy goods transport, a total of three 55m long trucks were used to get them to Drillberg. With the utmost precision, the crane operators steered the 22.5 tonne machines over the still open roof into the new high-bay facility. At a height of 100m, it was truly precision work for all those responsible.”

With the construction measures being currently implemented and planned, Würth Industrie Service is taking significant steps to ensure seamless supply for its customers in the future, as well as consciously contributing to sustainability targets. How this works in the case of SRMs is that the SRMs power consumption is optimised by means of DC-link coupling, which can divert the energy between two drives intelligently and efficiently. This means that the energy saved by the lift drive during lowering can, in turn, be used for the travel drive. The quality Kardex SRMs are robust, durable and require minimal maintenance.

Another contribution to sustainability is the greenhouse gas neutral energy supply to the machinery, with the south façade of the new
high-bay warehouse being equipped with a large scale photovoltaic system of solar panels, with an initial total output of 1,028kWp, but which is intended to achieve an eventual total output of over 2,000kWp, as well as a generation volume of around 1,500,000kWh, which can be applied across the whole Würth Industrial Park.