© John Welling
Ardagh Group has today announced investment of €2.4m in an automated warehousing facility at its production plant in the Netherlands.
The investment in the facility in Deventer includes the implementation of new stock management solutions, delivering an enhanced service to Ardagh’s customers, it said. The €2.4m injection also includes a fleet of fully automated forklift trucks, controlled by advanced software to manage the operation of the 7,500 square metre warehouse in a full “lights out” environment.
The trucks are designed to take four pallets at a time from the production area to the warehouse for storage and then take them back out again to one of the five loading bays for shipment.
The project is a collaboration between Ardagh Group and AGVE, a global supplier of AGV-systems. The system has been designed to stack the pallets four-high – equating to 12m in height – in deep bays. It is the first time that such stack configuration has been automated in Europe.
Jan de Bruin, plant manager of the Deventer facility, said: “Our new warehouse, adjacent to the production facility, gives us and our customers a more efficient, smoother, streamlined logistical service.
“It is longer than a football pitch (or the equivalent size of 40 indoor tennis courts), is equipped with the latest software and hardware systems to monitor movements, and, we calculate, will remove 12 tonnes of CO2 through fewer truck movements to our previous external warehouses.”
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