Successful installation of innovative 3-lift concept

Bürkert, one of the world’s leading companies for fluid control systems, sells its products in 38 countries and runs several international manufacturing facilities. This geographical spread poses a great challenge to the sales and logistics processes. As part of its long-term growth strategy, the company wanted to implement a new, future-proof and growth-oriented logistics concept.

Essential element of the concept is the new distribution center, which was opened in spring of 2014. At this location, the company gathers all global sales activities of the production sites in Germany and France.

Core of the distribution center is the automated psb shuttle warehouse with 10,000 storage positions, for up to 4-deep storage of transport bins of different size. The shuttle warehouse (one aisle) is operated with 7 vario.sprinter shuttles (cross-level concept). Further features of the warehouse are: parallel storage and retrieval, dynamic order picking, and automated bin return storage.

The special feature of this intralogistics installation is the shuttle concept enhanced by a 3-lift concept, with a shuttle lift and two centrally arranged tote lifts. The new system layout provides for psb to achieve a higher performance with the same number of shuttles, at reduced investment costs.

With the new distribution center, Bürkert could optimize the entire order picking and outbound processes, and, in addition, achieved a significant increase in its sales efficiency. Finally, the logistics service to the customers has been enormously improved.