INKISH.NEWS -

One of the most spoken-about topics in today's printing is automation, and Friday, June 18th, we had the chance to see automation at a level like never before. In the German city of Gallin, located about an hour's drive from Hamburg to the east, Schur Pack GmbH has built an entirely new, very efficient packaging printing company focusing on folding carton products.

Schur Pack was easy to recognize when we arrived in the industrial area with its white-painted high-bay warehouse and Schur branding. Despite being 5-6 years old, entering the building still appears as a brand new modern facility with a delicate choice of materials from floors, to doors, to pretty much everything. Though not precisely aware of what to expect, the expectations got higher!

We are welcomed by Production Manager Jan Bollweg and CEO Klaus Madsen. While we await the arrival of Group Commercial Director Jane Puggaard and Director Per Bækgaard from Schur's Danish headquarter, we get an excellent opportunity to understand more about what to expect.

Klaus Madsen and Jan Bollweg work at Schur Pack Germany GmbH. In the meeting room, we see many products produced at the plant, but we are not allowed to disclose the brands produced as it often is. But all well-known brands, and as an example, just one of the products is annually produced in 500,000,000 copies.

Per Bækgaard is the Director of Schur's Logistics and Palletizing products. We are filming from Germany as Schur Pack Germany is both a customer and a test site for the logistics solutions we will soon see.

Klaus Madsen is giving us a tour, and you very soon realize that this is a printing/packaging company like no other. Three Koenig & Bauer printing machines (1 x 106 and 2 x 145) are foil-wrapped in Schur's red colors and named after family members of the Schur company. Schur Pack is a 175 years old family-owned company and has become a global player focusing on packaging and flexible. The company has grown faster in the past 20-30 years and today operates entities in Europe, North America, and Australia.

When we entered the high-bay warehouse, it's fully automated, and you see robots handling both raw materials and finished products, ready to be shipped. The warehouse contains 23,000 pallets and interfaces with the Schur Logistics solution. The automated warehouse delivers raw material to the printing machines and finished products to the trucks picking up the goods for delivery. The essence of the logistics solution is to remove manual processes like moving pallets from the warehouse to the printing machines, from the printing machines to the die-cutters, to the gluing lines, to the packaging lines, and back to the high-bay. All over, you see AGV (Automated Guided Vehicles) bring pallets around at the shop floor.

When jobs are getting ready for print, the carton has already been picked up in the warehouse, and the printing machines are never not running because of no materials. Per Bækgaard explains that a skilled print operator should focus on printing and not picking up plates, cartons, and everything that most printing companies today, of course, recognize. When done manually, it would probably take between 5-10 minutes every time. With printing machines typically operating 18-20,000 sheets per hour, that could easily reach a total 'waste' time of between 15-20 minutes per hour - so the logistics solution dramatically improves productivity.

At Schur Pack Germany, the pallets are taken from the high-bay warehouse to a pile turner where the cardboard is aired and placed on plastic pallets. The single-use wooden pallets are then turned into chips that are used to heat the entire complex. As CEO Klaus Madsen explains, a major percentage of the energy is produced at the site with the wood chips and the solar panels on the roof.

The turned piles are automatically picked up by an AGV and then delivered directly into the printing machine. When the sheets have been printed, another AGV picks up the printed sheets and place these in a waiting position between the Bobst die-cutters and the Koenig & Bauer machines.

When the die-cutting lines are ready - and as far as I remember, there were five, the AGV's again automatically pick up the pallets and deliver them directly to the cutter. To see how machines and people work closely together is quite amazing.

As you can imagine, to make this work, the software connecting the dots is essential. Schur Logistics has specialized in software (and hardware). Still, Bækgaard numerous times stresses that each of the elements in the flow is from various vendors with their software, protocols, and standards and that Schur Logistics communicates with these protocols to ensure the entire flow.

As impressive as this setup is, the question is, of course, always whether this is only a solution for the really large printing companies. To this, Per Bækgaard explains (as you will soon be able to see in the interview on INKISH.TV), that automating the logistics is viable for companies of almost every size - and will bring instant value. He, however, stresses that the AGV's are best for the transport of pallets. When we talk about ROI, he also explains it's not only in relation to the efficiency improvement of the printing machines but also to the salary levels.

Soon we have our film ready from Gallin, and I am sure this is something that both commercial printing companies and packaging companies can have huge advantages looking into.

I was totally impressed and as I said to Per Bækgaard - "So Ein Ding muss Ich auch Haben."