The new logistics centre of Heuchemer Verpackung GmbH & Co KG inaugurated in combination with the opening of a 3-day in-house exhibition was fitted with a nearly 16-meter high VNA shuttle warehouse by STILL GmbH.

"The growth we have seen here in the past years has exceeded our highest expectations," a very happy Thomas Schmidt, Production Manager at Heuchemer Verpackung GmbH sumed up the development of the past years at the official inauguration of the modernised and extended Heuchemer logistics centre at the company's site in Miehlen. A nearly 16-meter high pallet channel rack, four STILLPalletShuttles, two MX-X VNA trucks and efficient conveyor equipment are the components of a system solution implemented by STILL for Heuchemer.

Every year some 450 million cardboard and plastics packages are stored and dispatched at the site. This makes Heuchemer one of Germanys leading packaging producers. To be fit for further growth, the company's management had decided to extend the logistics centre autumn 2012 and to automate as many processes as possible when modifying the centre. To do this the packaging company drew on the expertise of STILL GmbH, a leading supplier of customised intralogistics solutions worldwide. "For us that was a rather logical decision. We have been knowing the company for many years and are highly satisfied with the quality of the products," Production Manager Schmidt comments the good experience in the long term business relationship with STILL.

As a system integrator STILL had the responsibility to plan the entire system, define the building needs and technical requirements for the trucks, warehouse equipment and racking and after that to take the lead in the implementation of the whole project. "That was a thrilling task in which every detail needed careful attention," says STILL Project Manager Philipp Hoops.

Since August 2014 the modernised logistics centre is in regular service: on an average day the MX-X VNA trucks retrieve some 200 pallets with materials arriving from production from a buffer storage. To handle the pallets, a conveyor system with 12 chain conveyors was integrated into the lowest levels of the existing rack with a STILL shuttle system. From there the pallets are moved on to the high bay rack. To be precise: they are moved on to the semi-automatic STILLPalletShuttles. The shuttles are capable of automatically detecting the different hangovers of the pallets and automatically store them at equal distances in the channels of the 46-meter wide and 42-meter long high bay rack. Altogether the rack system provides 10 650 slots which are split up in over 1 000 rack channels.

At the official inauguration the next step in automating already came into sight: Removal from production, today being done manually with conventional STILL RX 20 electric trucks will be automated in the near future as well. This will be done with the new iGo Easy system from STILL which was handed over to Heuchemer on the occasion of the inauguration.

iGo Easy is the first automation solution worldwide for simple and standard transport jobs which can be fully configured, controlled and monitored by an iPad. And even more: the customer is able to install and adapt the system to changed circumstances later on, alone without the help of experts.