ENGINEERINGNET.EU - Yamazaki Mazak supplies its clients with the necessary spare parts to keep their machine parks operational from its central European Spare Parts Centre in Belgium.
However, large and heavy components are stored elsewhere, which incurs considerable annual costs. As a result, Mazak decided to store and manage these components itself and to build a new distribution centre.
Mazak also decided to automate the logistics at the new DC in order to provide more storage capacity in future, optimise the work flow and cut costs.
The company plans two automated warehouse systems: one for the uglies, where an automatic pallet warehouse with two aisle-switching cranes will serve 3,000 pallet locations in three different aisles, and a second one consisting of a miniload warehouse with two cranes for storing and picking smaller components in 8,000 boxes, providing storage for 70,000 different articles.
Mazak expects both sales and storage capacity to double over the next 15 years. Both new warehouses are due to go into operation at the end of 2014.
This news was provided to us by system integrator Egemin, who was awarded the logistics automation contract.
BACKGROUND
Yamazaki Mazak is a supplier of lathes, milling machines and production systems. Mazak, which has its headquarters in Nagoya, Japan, is an international company that makes advanced products in Japan, America, Europe, Singapore and China. It was the first Japanese engineering company to set up a production facility in Europe to cover all of the manufacturing processes from raw to finished product.
