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Georgsmarienhütte GmbH is one of the leading European suppliers of quality and engineering steel.
The company’s products are used to manufacture crankshafts, connecting rods, camshafts, drive shafts, transmission parts, chassis parts and much more.
Georgsmarienhütte GmbH is part of the GMH Gruppe, a group of over 20 companies that work together in partnership and have a global presence with their products.
From the raw material to the end product, different metallic materials are used.
The final operation of Georgsmarienhütte GmbH covers an area of approx. 130,000 m² and consists of a wide variety of production facilities such as heat treatment furnaces, straightening and testing lines, reworking units and dispatch stations, interspersed with storage areas.
The stocks of steel bar material fluctuate between 50,000 tons and 70,000 tons. According to the principle of “chaotic” warehousing, it is not possible in many places to separate semi-finished materials for further processing and material ready for dispatch by converting stocks, and these therefore merge seamlessly into one another.
A very large proportion of the employees in final operations work in this environment with 20 overhead cranes, sideloaders, narrow-gauge railroads and in truck and rail shipping, transporting the material through the process chain to the customer.
There were always situations in which the individual transport requirements were in competition with each other and therefore the risk of being forced to stand still due to waiting times.
Warehouse utilization was only decided on the basis of the current situation and did not take into account the production and dispatch planning spanning days and weeks, which led to unnecessary transports due to interim storage in this sometimes tense warehouse environment.
In the first step, the entire final operation, including its external areas, was measured and each of the more than 4,000 storage locations and material transfer points were precisely transferred to this coordinate system.
This data was then used by the material flow tracking intralogistics module (MFT) of the ABF solution
For this purpose, the means of transport were equipped with positioning technology (RTLS) and other sensors for determining weight and position, which were provided and integrated by ABF.
The data is transmitted from the means of transport to
This information is linked there with the material information from the feedback from the production systems as well as master data from the SAP ERP system and thus leads to the creation of the warehouse visualization in the 3D model in real time.
With the help of sensors on cranes and forklifts, all material movements are now tracked seamlessly from the material’s origin to loading onto rail wagons and trucks.
The mobile warehouse application provided by ABF also helps with the handling of transports with dachshund wagons between the warehouse bays.
With the knowledge of the exact position of the material during its creation and operation, the new intralogistics system looks at the subsequent production step in production planning and decides on the subsequent material flow through automatically generated transport orders.
The system should preferably transport the material that is required at short notice and whose requirements can be individually adapted to the immediate vicinity of the plant.
Material with a longer planned storage time should in turn be stored in a remote interim storage facility.
When making this decision, the MFT has to check and weigh up a wide range of criteria for the material at the storage locations.
The transports from the interim storage facility to the target plant are then triggered automatically via the production control system in order to secure the worklist at the target unit.
A transport order can consist of several transport orders using different means of transport and always relates to individual pieces of material.
This ensures the flexibility to prioritize the transport systems according to the situation. OneBase®MFT controls all transport movements in 14 halls of the final operation with appropriately prioritized transport orders.
Usability was always the focus during implementation.
For example, existing operational data collection processes were used as triggers to initiate processes in the MFT so that they could run virtually invisibly in the background for employees.
The crane and forklift drivers now have a new role to play: in the past, they were tasked with carrying out transports on call.
With the new MFT and the user interfaces provided on the vehicle terminals in the vehicle cabs, they now take the decisions themselves.
From now on, this new role must be consolidated and lived.
The 3D visualization of the means of transport operator is linked to the mobile application of the ground staff, which provides support when attaching the material.
The optimized transport orders are thus processed in system synchronization between the two employees.
Shouts or hand signals are therefore a thing of the past.
ABF is also very happy about the success of this extensive project and is looking forward to laying the foundation for the ongoing digitalization of its customer’s intralogistics.
We would like to thank the team of the final operation, the crane department and the vehicle workshop as well as our ABF team for the great cooperation!
