The Europe-wide operating company dataform is a full-service provider in dialog marketing and fulfillment. In addition to mailings and digital printing, dataform also offers flexible storage capacities, professional dispatch and returns management, as well as logistics outsourcing. With around 250 employees, dataform produces around 120 million mailings per year and sends around 1.2 million e-commerce packages in fulfillment.

In order to meet the steadily increasing growth of the full-service provider over the years, dataform dialogservices GmbH is investing in a new fulfillment and logistics center in Ammerndorf near Nuremberg. The company initially commissioned intralogistics specialist Klinkhammer with future-oriented logistics planning. Once the planning was complete, Klinkhammer was awarded the contract to implement its new fulfillment center for e-commerce. The total investment amounts to around 60 million euros and includes around 60,000 square meters of floor space. With the aim of doubling turnover by 2025, the new Buchschwabach site with its flexible logistics solutions offers the ideal conditions for dynamic markets and rapid growth rates in e-commerce.

In the fulfillment and logistics center, a three-storey shelving system with picking stations ensures flexible storage of bins and cartons. It holds 60,000 600 x 400 mm containers in various height classes. The picking area with 18 stations is connected to 14 goods-in stations including returns management, the automatic order consolidation buffer with 1,084 container storage locations, the 20 packing stations and the dispatch area. A total of 1,863 running meters of container conveyor technology and 30 running meters of pallet conveyor technology are installed in the system. The empty container management system with stacking machine and storage for 789 containers ensures the automatic supply of containers. The parcel conveyor line leads from the ergonomically arranged packing stations to the dispatch gate and automates loading onto the truck. In addition, a forklift-operated pallet warehouse for around 25,000 storage locations enables fast handling of palletizable goods. The warehouse management software and material flow control system KlinkWare guarantees short throughput times and lean processes thanks to the storage, retrieval, transport and order strategies tailored precisely to dataform. Batches, different clients and multi-order picking are optimally controlled by KlinkWare. A short overall throughput time enables regular and same-day orders to be processed efficiently on a large scale.

Digitization and automation are decisive competitive factors in dialogue marketing and fulfilment. The growing layout is therefore designed in such a way that options for expansion, such as workstations or robot-controlled storage systems, are already planned and can be flexibly implemented. The facility is expected to go into operation at the end of 2021.