Success story of a tool service provider

Standing inside Hahn+Kolb's towering logistics center in Ludwigsburg, you can literally feel the heartbeat of the industry: shuttles continuously race through the six-row, 14-meter-high and 90-meter-long high-bay warehouse. The autonomous systems store containers with a good 55,000 different items fully automatically on 26 levels - up to 3,000 items per hour. Directly next to the small parts warehouse is the equally high three-row pallet warehouse with a further 3,000 storage locations. The system delivers all the items required for a delivery to the ergonomic picking stations according to the "goods to man" principle. Once a consignment is complete, the container goes straight to packing and dispatch.

"We grow with our orders"

The name Hahn+Kolb is a household name for companies in the mechanical engineering, automotive, metal, electronics and energy industries. With eleven foreign subsidiaries, 45 sales partners and customers in 65 countries, Hahn+Kolb is now one of the world's leading system suppliers. For 125 years, the specialists for machining equipment, tools, machines and factory equipment have been supplying their customers with everything they need for successful production. And more and more companies are taking advantage of the smooth processes for procuring their operating resources, as the growth of the logistics center, one of the most modern in Europe, has shown in recent years: Logistics has already been expanded in several stages - from 104 to 170 shuttles and from originally 68,000 to now 110,000 container spaces. A good 800,000 parcels leave the logistics center every year.

"As we all know, you grow with your tasks - and we are growing as planned with our increasing orders," says Katrin Hummel, Managing Director of Hahn+Kolb. "We can be really proud of this on our 125th anniversary, even if we are not resting on our laurels. After all, it is the result of the hard work of our employees, who put their expertise and commitment to work for our customers every day."

The digital ordering processes of Industry 4.0, which Hahn+Kolb has been pushing for years and integrating into its logistics, play a central role in this. Whether via the online store, e-catalog or the customer's own ERP system - all orders are processed digitally in the company's logistics department and are handled by the system as quickly as possible. The current range includes more than 120,000 products. Intelligent automatic dispensers even determine the customer's requirements on site and trigger an order before stocks run out in production.