E-T-A automates with Jungheinrich: New warehouse for production and dispatch in Altdorf

E-T-A Elektrotechnische Apparate GmbH, founded in 1948 with 1,300 employees and five production sites, sells 28 million products every year in over 60 countries. The specialist for customised solutions for overcurrent protection, power distribution, relays and intelligent complete systems is already thinking about tomorrow: according to forecasts at the headquarters in Altdorf near Nuremberg, storage and retrieval will continue to increase massively until 2030, which is why E-T-A is currently building a new, future-proof logistics building that can be expanded at any time with the corresponding storage and transport technology with Jungheinrich at its side.

rom planning and project management to customer service, the responsibility for implementing the project lies in the hands of Jungheinrich. In concrete terms, an automatic, single-aisle high-bay warehouse for double-deep storage with over 3,800 and a likewise automatic, single-aisle container shuttle warehouse with more than 56,000 storage spaces (triple-deep storage) and 94,000 storage spaces (triple-deep storage) respectively are to be built for production and warehousing, whereby the warehouse will be 95 metres long, 19 metres wide and 27 metres high.

Jungheinrich is supplying not only the tote shuttle warehouse for this project, including two tote lifts and 32 shuttle trucks, but also the pallet stacker crane. The scope of supply also includes the tote and pallet conveyor technology with control and visualisation as well as the workstations for goods receipt, order picking and dispatch. The WMS (Warehouse Management System) for the central control of all intralogistical processes also comes from Jungheinrich.

And these are complex: the high-bay warehouse with levels for Euro pallets, industrial pallets, mesh boxes and coil racks is connected to a conveyor system for storing and retrieving the load units. "In the container shuttle warehouse, the shuttle vehicles are transferred from level to level with the double gondola within the aisle," Denis Gorbatenko, project manager realisation, emphasises a special feature. For the time being, not every storage level of the container shuttle warehouse will be equipped with a shuttle vehicle. But so that all racking levels can be used right from the start, the shuttle lifter is planned with a double gondola for a level change of the shuttle vehicles. Attached to the container shuttle warehouse are again 24 workstations for the handling of small load carriers from the areas of incoming and outgoing goods as well as order picking.

Due to future performance requirements, the container lifters of the shuttle warehouse will be designed as double clearance lifters without offset travel. This means: highest efficiency due to simultaneous unloading and reloading of the container lifter. The connection as a double cycle lifter allows an aisle capacity of 800 double cycles per hour, whereby the system will be in operation in two shifts from Monday to Friday. If one of the container lifters is out of order, the second container lifter can still be used to supply and dispose of each level. If required, the system can also be expanded with additional shuttle trucks.

"Jungheinrich offered us the best price-performance ratio," says Gerd Pohle, Head of Logistics, citing one of the central reasons that influenced E-T-A's decision in favour of the intralogistics expert, in addition to the good business relationship. "That's why we also decided to continue working with Jungheinrich.