The new Fiege Single User Center in Hungary has a floor space of around 42,000 square meters. © HEBER conveyor technology

The offer to implement a manual interim solution with the help of order picking trolleys and forklifts was also decisive for the award of the contract. As a result, the workforce at Fiege Szállítmányozási és Logisztikai Kft. was able to start work even before the full automation was completed.

Cleverly combined and implemented during operation

The collaboration began with the signing of the letter of intent (LOI) in April 2021, followed by the commissioning of the manual interim solution in September of the same year and the go-live of the automated system in mid-March 2022. The tight timeframe was a particular challenge in itself. At the same time, while the warehouse was already under construction, more than ten subcontractors had to be coordinated and Covid-related restrictions and delays on the supplier side had to be compensated for.

There are 24 loading telescopes in use for convenient loading. © HEBER conveyor technology

As the staff at the new logistics center had already started processing online orders in September 2021, the container and parcel conveyor system with a total length of around two kilometers was set up by lifters during ongoing operations. In addition to the machines for carton erection and carton volume reduction, the conveyor system also includes banding. There are also continuous weighers for pick checking and parcel weight determination, five stations for dispatch labeling and 24 loading telescopes. Several NOK controls, eight manual workstations, two quality control stations and four areas for manual palletizing of cartons are also connected.

By integrating the machines for volume reduction, Fiege is also counteracting the problem, increasingly criticized by customers, that shipping cartons often contain more air than goods. The system cuts the parcels to the exact size of the contents, folds the cardboard boxes back together accordingly and provides them with a lid. One effect of the high-density filling level achieved that should not be underestimated is the ability to make optimum use of the capacity of vans and trucks, thus significantly reducing transport costs.

Process varying sizes reliably and error-free at high speed

When asked about the Herculean tasks that had to be mastered in the areas of mechanics, software and control technology, István Vincze explains: "I see the biggest challenges in the control software. There are many individual components and processing machines within the two-kilometer-long conveyor system, and the throughput is up to 2,800 parcels per hour. Coordinating all of this was a major task."

The dimensions of the eligible packages vary between 305 and a maximum of 950 millimetres in length. The minimum weight is 150 grams, and values of up to 32.5 kilograms are achieved on the scale upwards. At the same time, when designing the automatic systems, it had to be taken into account that the distribution of the carton sizes can fluctuate when they are fed onto the conveyor system. Among other things, these shifting loads were to be compensated for by appropriate buffer capacities, especially in front of the manual finishing stations. It also had to be taken into account that the number of straps per package during banding depends on the size of the outer cartons.

Targets also achieved thanks to flexible change management

In view of the current order situation, Fiege's single-user center in Szigetszentmiklós, centrally located on one of Hungary's main traffic arteries, operates a two-shift system from Monday to Sunday. At weekends, an extended shift of ten hours can be added if required. "There are always surprises with such a large, extremely complex project, in which many dynamically sequenced process stages had to be implemented, especially as the preparation time was very short," sums up site manager István Vincze. "Active change management was also frequently required. Heber proved to be flexible and fast in this regard and solved all problems that arose during the ongoing process 100 percent. We achieved all the targets we set ourselves."

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