Together in Automation

To begin with, Christoph Mangelmans shared “a disappointment”, as he put it, with the 100+ invitees. The Managing Director of FIEGE’s Fashion & Lifestyle business unit said during the opening of the inaugural Together in Automation event held at its location in Apfelstädt near Erfurt, for which FIEGE had extended the invitation: “You will get to see a lot about automation and many innovative logistics solutions here, yet you won’t be seeing anything that you would also get to see at the major logistics fairs.” A however followed hot on the heels: “However, you will be able to see here live what really works operationally – and what possibly doesn’t.”

Learning with and from each other

That was exactly what this day was all about, as Mangelmans emphasises: “What we are aiming to achieve with our Together in Automation event is the possibility of an open and honest exchange about automation in logistics. We wish to talk about things that work well. But we also wish to talk about things which often are overlooked in other places – things that don’t pan out well in relation to automation within logistics. It is about learning from each other and sharing both knowledge as well as experience.”

Jens Veltel kicked off the event with his presentation titled Stage of Automation, which highlighted the latest trends, benefits and opportunities in automation. FIEGE’S Director Warehouse Automation summed up the “six Rs” in warehouse automation: the right concept, the right partners, the right technology, the right integration, the right acceptance, and the right costs. Following this, Christoph Kuntz, Managing Director at the consultancy proLOG explained what, in his opinion, is indispensable for an automation project. The title of his paper: Technology by itself is never (not) economical – it is the application concept that makes for the business case. Kuntz’ theory: “It takes modularity, and it takes more components, to get it right.”

One of Germany’s largest Autostores

There is no theory without practice. Ronny Hirth, Director Supply Chain Management at the sportswear retailer, SportScheck and Stephan Wittenbrink, Managing Director of the Industrial business unit at FIEGE, talk about the Autostore project that SportScheck and FIEGE have already implemented in Apfelstädt. Since 2014, SportScheck has been distributing their merchandise out of FIEGE’s logistics centre in Thuringia with help from an Autostore – one of the biggest in Germany – since 2023.

Following the testimonial, an exploratory tour across the 130,000 square-metres-large logistics centre is on the agenda. En route to the SportScheck Autostore, which is not only to be a point of discussion but also an object of admiration, the tour takes the guests past pouch sorters, kilometres of conveyor technology as well as fully-automated paper bag and parcel packaging machinery by XPROMA and CMC which can fully automatedly pack either 1,200 paper bags or up to 600 parcels per hour and attach a shipping label all while saving packaging material. After arriving at the destination, it is impressively demonstrated what being “one of Germany’s biggest Autostores” actually means: 160 robots pick almost two million different articles from 270,000 bins on a huge area that is almost 10,000 square metres large.

People at the centre of technology

Lively on-stage debates follow the lunch break. Marcus Karten, Director Business Development at the FIEGE Fashion & Lifestyle business unit, hosts the expert panel, Automation compass: Strategies and foundations for future-proof logistics. Peter Bimmermann of AutoStore System GmbH, Michael Greschke of Miebach Consulting, Christoph Kuntz of proLOG, Ronny Hirth of SportScheck as well as Jens Veltel and the branch manager, Markus Steinmann of FIEGE join him on stage. Automation affords which opportunities? What is the role of artificial intelligence in all this? How to respond to the scarcity of skilled labour? Things get deep. “I believe that we can take many valuable insights and stimuli with us today”, says Christoph Mangelmans at the end of the day. “The topic of automation is also about flexibility, resilience, software, about trustworthy partnerships and surely also about courage. Given all the technology that we admired and talked about today, it is also always about people taking centre stage. Because in the end, it is the people who ensure that automation becomes exactly what you want to achieve with it: a success.”