Leipzig Stores 6,500 Containers in 210 Square Metres. The Assembly Line Still Pulls by Hand
An aircraft part does not fail the line because it is missing from the warehouse. It fails because it arrives at the station out of sequence, or because the inspection that cleared it was not on the file. Deutsche Aircraft has put a digitally controlled logistics system into its Factory 4.0 at Leipzig/Halle Airport for the D328eco programme. LARA reported that the Jungheinrich PowerCube holds more than 6,500 containers across 26 levels in about 210 square metres, and that an automated very narrow aisle warehouse holds 624 pallet positions. The company has said it is preparing to ramp toward up to 48 aircraft a year. The store is dense. The question is what still has to be done by a person.
The Kit Follows the Schedule. The Part Does Not Sit on the Line
Michael Rentschler, head of transport and logistics at Deutsche Aircraft, said in written comments to The Supply Chainer that material supply follows a fully digitally controlled logistics concept that meets aviation requirements for quality, traceability and supply reliability. Components are inspected, documented and recorded in the warehouse management system as soon as they arrive at receiving. They are then stored in the appropriate zones, including the Auto VNA, Power Cube and cantilever rack systems, and picked as needed against production and assembly schedules.
The link between logistics and production, he said, is digital material requirements planning. "The required components and parts are assembled by order and workstation (kiting) and made available in the sequence dictated by the progress of assembly. This ensures that the right parts are available at the right time and in the right place, while avoiding unnecessary inventory in production."
The same limit is already on the record. In The Supply Chainer's piece on robotics deployment, Kevin Xu, vice president of strategic initiatives at ShipMonk, said: "We go for operational excellence before automation. It's easy to justify ROI on inefficient operations. Before we scale any automation capability across our network, we run pilots on low commitments. We test the equipment, stress the constraints, and see what the floor actually throws at it."
The Shuttle Is Automated. The Station Is Not
A key component of the material flow, Rentschler said, is automated production supply. Picked materials are transported to the individual assembly stations via a fully automated shuttle system from Neumaier Industries. The system follows the defined supply routes and keeps a continuous supply through the production process. Automation covers warehouse management, inventory control, material requisitioning from production, component traceability and internal material transport.
Quality-related and safety-critical activities remain with qualified employees. Those include incoming goods inspections and tests, documentation and compliance checks, and the physical retrieval and handling of components at the workstations. "Employees at the stations manually remove the provided load carriers and components and feed them directly into the assembly process." By combining digital control, automated material supply and quality-assured manual steps, he said, Deutsche Aircraft joins the efficiency of modern intralogistics with the safety and quality standards of aviation.
A dense store and a shuttle that runs a fixed route do not clear a part for the airframe. The inspection is still a person. The hand that takes the load carrier off the shuttle and puts the component into the assembly is still a person. Until those two steps are on the same file as the kit, the automation has moved the part to the station. It has not decided that the part is fit to fly.
