Automatic Tugger Train Loading with a Preceding Shuttle Sequencing Warehouse
Customer: Marquardt Gruppe
Project duration: 12 months
Our customer:
The Marquardt Group (hereinafter referred to as “Marquardt”) is a globally active, family-owned company that has successfully established itself in various business sectors since 1925. Since its founding in 1925, the Marquardt Group has evolved into one of the world’s leading experts in mechatronics. Today, more than 11,000 employees work at 22 locations worldwide for Marquardt in the areas of automotive, off-road vehicles, trucks, cleaning equipment, and home technology.
Initial situation:
In 2019, Marquardt purchased an existing factory site with production halls in Ichtershausen, centrally located and easily accessible at Freeway junction at Erfurt in Germany. The company produces mechatronic system solutions there, including functional ambient lighting for vehicle interiors and battery management systems for electric and hybrid vehicles.
The factory site consists of several connected buildings. The products are manufactured in a 10,000 square meters huge production hall. Long transport routes between the halls and limited space conditions with a ceiling height of just under eight meters have made the provision of materials for production difficult. To meet the required growth rates for the coming years, a flexible and largely automated storage solution had to be found within the limited space.
For production supply and storage of finished goods for OEMs, three fully automated shuttle and container warehouses, as well as autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and several tugger trains, were installed.
As part of the project, HPC implemented processes based on SAP EWM with hight automation. Thanks to the integrated material flow system (EWM-MFS), the three automatic warehouses, the AMRs, and the tugger trains could be directly connected to the vendors PLC without any middleware.
To connect the tugger trains, a concept was developed that automatically retrieves material from a container warehouse, sequences it, and buffers it in a sequencing shuttle warehouse for fully automatic tugger train loading.
Project Objectives:
- Fast and Frequent Material Delivery: The production should be quickly and frequently supplied with materials by automatic tugger trains, so no inventory is needed in production.
- Seamless Integration: The connection of the automatic warehouses and the tugger trains should be without middleware.
- Automatic Sequencing and Loading: The loading of the tugger trains is based on the production supply areas and the planned route through production. The loading of the tugger trains is fully automatic in less than a minute.
- Flexible Route Planning: The routes of the tugger trains should be flexibly and dynamically plannable.
What did HPC accomplish?
- The connection of the automatic storage and tugger train loading systems was done via the material flow control integrated into SAP EWM (EWM-MFS).
- Development of a flexible tugger train concept considering:
- Various and flexible routes with multiple stations.
- Creation of schedules to meet strict departure times.
- A configurable train composition (number of wagons, compartments, and their capacity).
- Setup of user-friendly interfaces.
- Container Preparation: Automatic and timely provision of material.
- Station Configurations: Specific loading and unloading sides for variable routes.
- Training of employees during commissioning.
- Continuous support of the customer from planning to productive use.
- Resupply analysis parallel to the active trip.
- The load per tugger train wagon is considered during partial unloading (curve driving).
- Consideration of ergonomic requirements (central placement of heavy containers).
Customer benefits:
- A flexible tugger train concept that can be transferred to other locations.
- Suitable for both automatic and manual loading.
- Quick onboarding of new employees through intuitive design.
- Efficient loading: up to 96 boxes in under a minute.
- Low maintenance effort and high error tolerance.
- High flexibility through many adjustment and configuration options.
What were the challenges?
Accepting frequently changing requirements in existing buildings with limit space, our consultants had to implement to system in an agile manner. Simultaneous loading of up to four tugger trains within short time frames was challenging. Despite the challenges, the project duration was maintained, and our client was able to start productive use on schedule. With this automation, Marquardt was able to ensure production supply more efficient and further optimize production processes.
