STILL installed a nearly 16-metre high VNA shuttle warehouse at Heuchemer Verpackung GmbH & Co KG.

STILL GmbH has fitted a nearly 16-metre (52-foot) high VNA shuttle warehouse to the new logistics centre of Heuchemer Verpackung GmbH & Co KG in Miehlen, Germany.

"The growth we have seen here in the past years has exceeded our highest expectations," said Thomas Schmidt, production manager at Heuchemer Verpackung GmbH at the official inauguration of the modernised and extended Heuchemer logistics centre.

About 450 million cardboard and plastic packages are stored and dispatched at the site annually, making Heuchemer one of Germany's leading packaging producers. The company decided to extend the logistics centre in 2012 and to automate as many processes as possible, in anticipation of future growth.

A nearly 16-metre high pallet channel rack, four STILLPalletShuttles, two MX-X VNA trucks and efficient conveyor equipment are the components of the system solution implemented by STILL.

"We have (known) the company [STILL] for many years and are highly satisfied with the quality of the products," Schmidt says.

As a system integrator, STILL was responsible for planning the entire system, defining the building needs and technical requirements for the trucks, warehouse equipment and racking, and taking the lead in the implementation of the whole project.

The modernised logistics centre has been in regular service since August. On an average day, the MX-X VNA trucks retrieve about 200 pallets with materials arriving from production from a buffer storage. To handle the pallets, a conveyor system with 12 chain conveyors was integrated into the lowest levels of the existing rack with a STILL shuttle system. From there, the pallets are moved on to the semi-automatic STILLPalletShuttles.

The shuttles can automatically detect the different hangovers of the pallets and automatically store them at equal distances in the channels of the 46-metre wide and 42-metre long high-bay rack.

The rack system provides 10,650 slots, which are split over 1,000 rack channels.