Venne in the Osnabrück region is Häcker Küchen's newest location, Plant 5, which went into operation in August 2020 after less than two years of construction. Around 300 employees in a production area of around 110,000 m² manufacture furniture for fitted kitchens here. "The investment in the new plant was the largest in the company's history," explains Dirk Krupka, Managing Director Technology at Häcker. "We have also launched a new product line onto the market that we would not have been able to manufacture in any of our previous plants." Krupka is talking about the systemat 3.0 product line, a high-quality, design-oriented kitchen that offers even more options for kitchen planning in a 13-unit grid. No two kitchens are the same. "The logistical demands are quite extreme. We only manufacture to customer order, which means we have complete batch size 1 production," emphasizes Dirk Krupka.

To achieve this, the aim when planning the new plant was to completely control the material flow. "There is no undefined material status," explains Friedbernd Bartels, Head of Technical Projects at Häcker. "Every material movement is controlled according to the source-destination principle and every movement, every work step, is reported back to the system." The special feature here is that the Viadat software from Viastore is used to control material flows throughout the plant.

"The production supply and disposal required by Häcker is a standard requirement for Viadat," emphasizes Peer Leemhuis, who supervised the project on behalf of Viastore. Coupling with the control systems of different logistics systems and technologies is also part of everyday life for the system - even if there are a few more of these than usual in Häcker's Plant 5: in addition to a 16-aisle high-bay warehouse, an electric monorail system, a shuttle warehouse, a gantry picking system and five pick-by-light and two put-to-light storage areas are also integrated. Viadat also functions as a forklift and AGV control system with nine driverless transport vehicles.

Complex processes controlled on time

Häcker has divided the production into different processes in order to do justice to the different variations and therefore production costs of the various components of a cabinet: The carcase components are divided into A, B and C parts. A-parts are assemblies that are very frequently required in the same variant - for example, standard base units in white. They are transferred directly from the high-bay warehouse (HRL) on pallets via the electric monorail system (EMS) to the automated guided vehicle system and transported to the assembly station. Viadat receives the corresponding replenishment request from the final assembly line via a database interface. Viadat is also the leading system for the AGV: it takes care of order control, recording and booking the load unit with the respective stock.

Picking the B and C parts is more complex, as the variance here is significantly higher: this includes tall cabinets or colored cabinet sides, for example. Some of the components are transported from the high-bay warehouse via the EMS to an automatic picking station, where they are stored on pallets by 6-axis robots. These are either brought directly to the assembly stations, undergo further processing or are temporarily stored in a buffer warehouse.

Fronts and drawers just-in-sequence

The process for the fronts is similarly complex: Coming from the high-bay warehouse or surface treatment, they are temporarily stored in a shuttle warehouse. Buffering ensures that a pallet with the required raw fronts is retrieved from the high-bay warehouse at freely configurable times as required. Only the parts required for the next working day are picked from this pallet.

The trays are removed from the buffer in the correct sequence and transported to a removal station, where gantry robots remove the fronts for further processing. If necessary, they are then transported to drilling systems where the boards are perforated and fitted with hinges. Robots then assemble the prepared fronts in trolleys, in which they are finally transported to the assembly area, where they are married to the carcass. Here too, Viadat controls all storage and transport movements, takes over stock management in the shuttle warehouse and supplies the workstations and machines with the relevant processing information.

At the same time, the drawers are manufactured and temporarily stored in a buffer warehouse. "We know when which carcase has been released via the production system control," explains Krupka. "The pull-outs and drawers are synchronized with this and, together with the fittings and the associated fronts, are delivered to the corresponding carcase at exactly the right time." All transports to the assembly department are organized by Viadat on a just-in-time and just-in-sequence basis, and stocks are precisely recorded and managed.

Friedbernd Bartels adds: "The components are not identified using stickers or barcodes on the components. The sequence in which the components are routed through production or picked is completely paperless." This means that Viadat knows where each component is currently located at all times. "There is no other manufacturing execution system - the only higher-level system with which Viadat still communicates is the ERP system, which determines the dispatch sequence and the sequences in production," says Peer Leemhuis.

Enormous transaction volume

Even though Viadat masters production supply as standard, production at Häcker presented the system with a challenge, as Leemhuis continues: "If you consider that each cabinet consists of many parts, each part goes through several process steps and each time represents an order item in Viadat, the resulting transaction behavior in Viadat is extremely high." As part of the project, Viastore once again optimized the databases that Viadat works with.

"All in all, we have realized a production facility in the new plant that allows us to manufacture an enormously diverse range at marketable prices," says Dirk Krupka, drawing a positive conclusion. He sees Viastore as an important system supplier: "With Viastore, we had a reliable partner during project realization, with whom we were able to implement the system on time despite time pressure. Viadat has shown how much potential it has - with the term warehouse management, it is clearly selling itself short."

This article appeared in issue 4/23