The dream project in the far north

The order put out to tender by Dräger at the end of August 2015, for which Utz had applied, comprised open-fronted storage bins on a tray and open-fronted storage bins in the container. There were a number of specifications to be met: A closed raised floor had to withstand loads of up to 60 kg. Utz welded this to the bottom of the container using a vibration welding process. Furthermore, in-mold labels, which are inserted into the casting tool and virtually become part of each individual container, and a predefined contact resistance of the containers were required. Considering that around 80 percent of the area of the Dräger factory is ESD areas, you can imagine how important this requirement alone was for the project.

After the "go live", production could be supplied quickly

At the heart of the project is a small parts warehouse with 120,000 container storage locations and a pallet warehouse with a capacity of 6,500 pallets. Since the plant went live in April 2016, production can now be supplied with components by the logistics department over short distances. Since then, the networked plant logistics system has managed without road transportation, instead distributing the containers to the production destinations using Milkrun trains.

Utz Group

Georg Utz GmbH is a manufacturer of storage and transport containers, pallets, workpiece carriers and technical parts made of recyclable plastic. The company in Schüttorf is the German branch of the Swiss Georg Utz Holding AG in Bremgarten. The Georg Utz Group, with branches in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Poland, the USA and China, employs more than 1,000 people, around 550 of whom work in Schüttorf. The annual turnover is around 240 million euros and up to 30,000 tons of plastic are processed each year. The product range can be divided into Stacking containers, space-saving containers, pallets, pallet containers, transport rollers, technical customer parts and food processing. All these products are manufactured by injection molding. Utz also produces customized workpiece carriers using the thermoforming process (deep drawing).

As part of the future logistics concept, the project team also worked intensively on standardizing the container concept: whereas there were previously 75 containers from different manufacturers, the new concept shrank the logistically difficult to handle variety to six container types and then defined the quantity structures.

Dräger

Dräger is a leading international medical and safety technology company. Its products protect, support and save lives. Founded in 1889, Dräger generated global sales of over 2.5 billion euros in 2016. The Lübeck-based company is represented in more than 190 countries and employs more than 13,000 people worldwide.

"Utz offered us a convincing concept, the good cooperation not only in this phase convinced us," says Nils Rickert, praising the Schüttorf container specialists, who have a similar view. "You could tell that both sides wanted to work together, the approach was very determined and solution-oriented," recalls Wolfgang Faust, Sales Manager North at Utz. The time frame of the project was "challenging" - Utz doesn't just produce over 100,000 containers within a few weeks - but it worked, as you could see later on during the tour: Utz containers everywhere.

In future, the supplier will provide advance

Provision Milkrun.

Up to 1,000 shipments leave the Lübeck site, which employs around 5,000 people in total, every day. Following the successful "Go Live", Sieber, who is responsible for production logistics, is now aiming to increase efficiency and optimize the system. For example, while the parts are currently still being converted to production requirements in the incoming goods department, which means around 4,000 to 5,000 picks per day, in future the supplier will produce the parts in the container that will later be passed on to production. Since "Go Live", Dräger is already benefiting from a much faster delivery of parts to the production line within two to four hours.

For the Utz Group, the order was a "very important project", as was the equipping of the Tchibo warehouse in Gallin (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) back in 1995, as Wolfgang Faust reports: "In principle, this scale is exciting for any container supplier". So it is not only thanks to this reference project that Utz is heading into the fall business with confidence. Martin Schrüfer

www.draeger.com www.utzgroup.com