February 6, 2018 --- Construction work is progressing briskly on the largest single investment in HARTING’s history, the HARTING "European Distribution Center (EDC)" logistics center.
Meyer, along with Sven Düker, Project Manager Construction in the Facility Management area at HARTING, recently showed the construction progress at Marie-Harting-Straße 1 in Espelkamp to a group of international and German trade journalists.
Over the past few days, the steelwork for the 6,900-station pallet warehouse and the two pickers and shuttle consolidation buffers has been completed. At the same time, work is being carried out on construction of the 120,000-station automated small parts warehouse and the picking and packing stations, which were initially designed in advance with ergonomics specialists in the field of occupational health and safety as part of cardboard engineering. The warehouse areas and the highly automated order picking are the two hearts of the new EDC.
The high-bay warehouse provides space for 6,900 pallets and around 120,000 storage containers in an area of 4,500 square meters and is operated in fully automated, paperless fashion. The bulk of material movements between the halls takes place via driverless transport systems. The picking area covers approximately 6,500 square meters. In the future, some 20,000 customer order items will be picked and packed individually here in accordance with customer requirements. 10,000 parcels on up to 110 trucks and vans will leave the European Distribution Center (EDC) as "safe air freight" or by sea and land to provide customers with HARTING products in the shortest possible time.
Environmental aspects were also taken into account during planning. Geothermal energy is used in the EDC. Some 36 holes were drilled for the geothermal facility, with each hole drilled to a depth of 150 meters.
The future administrative area will be open, a move which is intended to promote communication among employees.