Festo, a global leader in automation technology, has laid the foundations for its future growth by relocating its US-based production, service, and logistics centre from Long Island, New York, to Mason, Ohio.
The state-of-the-art project was designed and realised by the system integrator WITRON Logistik + Informatik, from Parkstein, Germany. Both Festo, which has its global headquarters in Esslingen, Germany, and WITRON have worked closely together since the early 1990s, forming a partnership based around the joint implementation of logistics projects.
Basis For Future Growth
Festo's decision to move its facilities was taken as the business was reaching its capacity limit at its location on Long Island, New York. In addition, its geographic location in the eastern United States was no longer ideal for the continuously growing number of customers throughout the NAFTA region.
The newly built production, service, and logistics centre, in Mason, Ohio, takes over the function of a regional service centre (RSC) and creates space for additional growth in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Due to the central location and the leading-edge logistics processes featured at the new RSC, Festo can serve its customers even faster and more flexibly with its innovative, customer-specific, tailor-made solutions.
“From our perspective, the geographic location of Mason, Ohio, was predestined for this new building,” said Yannick Schilly, Vice-President of Product Supply NAFTA and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Festo Corporation. “This concerns both the existing infrastructure and the access to customers, specialists, and logistics service providers.”
At the Ohio site, WITRON is responsible for the development, design, and commissioning of all IT, control and mechanical components. A WITRON OnSite team will carry out system maintenance and service.
Festo’s customers in North America typically plan for the short term and expect supplies very rapidly – something that the new WITRON-powered RSC is able to deliver.
“Product availability and short delivery times are the most important issues in our industry sector,” emphasises Andreas Wiebe, Project Manager of Logistics at Festo USA. “All items ordered today have to be received by the customers on the next day.”
Longstanding, Successful Partnership
The successful business relationship between Festo and WITRON has been in place since 1994.
WITRON has successively expanded Festo's automated central warehouse, located in St Ingbert-Rohrbach (Saarland, Germany), over the span of four construction stages, adapting the material-flow processes proactively to the company's dynamic business development.
As a result of this investment, Festo is able to offer an optimal delivery service to more than 300,000 customers in 176 countries.
Festo works with WITRON’s standard module OPS (Order Picking System), analogous to the central warehouse in Germany. “The scalable OPS system has proven itself successfully worldwide in numerous projects, such as online trade and parts distribution, as well as spare-parts distribution, and corresponds to the highest quality demands,” says Karl Hoegen, CEO of WITRON North America.
With this in mind, WITRON has realised a tailor-made system with innovative software and mechanical components for Festo USA. Energy-efficient conveyor system elements and stacker cranes from WITRON’s subsidiary FAS optimise the entire material-flow process at Festo. WITRON USA takes over the helpdesk and the spare-parts supply.
The automated picking system, OPS, represents the integration of an automated small-parts warehouse (AS/RS), a distribution loop, and upstream picking workstations. The items used at the OPS workstations are provided for picking according to the goods-to-person principle – order related and in the right sequence. Storage and retrieval is de-coupled from picking through the use of integrated sequence buffers. OPS enables storage and order-picking in one system.
"This project is a great chance for us to demonstrate our logistical competence in the non-food sector in the United States,” says Hoegen. “As a demanded general contractor for food retail, we are also very successful with customers from the electronics, health-care, and parts-distribution industries.”
For further information, visit www.witron.de.
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