April 2019

26 n INDUSTRY 4.0 April 2019 www.drivesncontrols.com Boxing clever I n the biggest single investment in its history, the enclosures giant Rittal is spending €250m to build what it claims will be the world’s most advanced plant for producing compact and small enclosures. The factory, located in the town of Haiger, about 100km north of Frankfurt, covers 24,000m 2 of floor space across two levels. When fully operational later this summer, it will be able to produce around 9,000 of the company’s new-generation AX (compact) and KX (small) enclosures every day. Each sheet steel or stainless steel enclosure will be built to order by the plant, which has been designed on Industry 4.0 principles. Rittal is aiming to be able to deliver standard products to German customers within 24 hours of an order being received. Elsewhere in Europe, it hopes to deliver within 48 hours. A large part of the massive investment has gone on more than 100 high-tech production machines and 60 robots, designed to adapt their operations flexibly to match incoming orders. The plant is expected to process 25,000 tonnes of steel every year to produce enclosures in around 150 standard configurations and sizes. Some €50m of the investment has been devoted to a new automated global distribution centre (GDC) located nearby. In the past, the individual steps needed to create small electrical enclosures – such as cutting to size, edging, welding and painting – were performed sequentially, and independently of each other. In the new plant, all of the machines, as well as the materials and people, will be integrated under a single manufacturing execution system (MES). Each night, orders from an SAP ERP system will be analysed – typically 600,000–700,000 permutations are expected to be calculated every night – to generate a production schedule for the next day. The IT system is integrated vertically from the ERP system down to individual PLCs (mainly Siemens S7- 1500 models). Each morning an optimised schedule containing four hours of orders will be sent from the MES to a master computer. “It’s like an MP3 playlist,” says Oliver Poth, manager of the Haiger plant. The orders will be carried out consecutively. The PLCs will keep track of what materials have been used and when they need to be replenished using a logistics execution system which will ensure that there are sufficient stocks for subsequent orders. The 12,500m 2 ground floor production area is split into different zones for sheet- steel and stainless-steel enclosures. There are Rittal is investing €250m in a new factory that embraces Industry 4.0 principles to produce a new generation of small enclosures more flexibly than ever attempted before. The plant aims to deliver completed enclosures within 24 hours of an order being placed. Tony Sacks visited the site as production was starting to ramp up. Teams of robots weld small enclosures on Rittal’s automated production lines. It takes just seven seconds to weld each box.