SEW-Eurodrive – The success story continues
SEW-Eurodrive, manufacturer of drive technology for machines and plants, located in Bruchsal, Germany, has been one of psb’s regular customers for many years. In the business year 2021, the company achieved a turnover of approximately 3.6 billion €, with about 20,200 employees worldwide.
Only a few years after it went live, the production site of SEW USOCOME in Brumath, France, will be expanded. Following a challenging tender process, psb intralogistics obtained the order to supply the intralogistics system for the plant expansion.
Motors and gearboxes are assembled in the Industry 4.0 plant built in 2015. A key competitive factor for SEW is the modular system from which customers can configure gear motors according to their individual requirements. The high variance of end products that can be achieved in this way is based on as few standardised individual components as possible and is finally realised by combining them during assembly.
This means that gear motors are not produced for stock, but are manufactured on a customer-specific and order-related basis in a one-piece flow. This form of production organisation requires a very high degree of flexibility from production and the associated intralogistics processes.
An important part of the expansion is the new intralogistics system designed by psb; an automated warehouse with additional picking stations will further increase the assembly capacity in the plant. Moreover, additional loading and unloading docks will be integrated.
In the first expansion phase, a Multi Access Warehouse with 122,000 storage locations for totes weighing up to 65 kg will be built to supply and clear the various production areas.
A downstream sequencing warehouse with 1,300 storage locations, also equipped with shuttle technology, supplies the individual plant areas with production material in a precise sequence and also serves as a buffer during peak load periods. For goods-in/goods-out, an automatic roller loading and unloading station for totes, with robot technology, was developed.
An automated pallet warehouse with 3,500 storage locations for pallets and pallet cages buffers palletised goods and makes them available at repacking stations or as whole pallets for the various plant areas. The automatic pallet conveyor system connects the various plant areas (goods-in, repacking, etc.) with the pallet warehouse.