Danish wholesaler Lemvigh-Müllers is strengthening its market position and preparing the company for the future with a new, state-of-the-art warehouse—the company’s largest-ever investment in logistics. KNAPP has been selected as a partner for the new warehouse’s automation.
Danish technical wholesaler Lemvigh-Müller is currently making its largest-ever investment in warehousing and is consolidating warehouse operations at its two existing facilities in Odense and Kolding into a single, state-of-the-art warehouse in Kolding. The investment ensures that Lemvigh-Müller can handle larger volumes of goods and offer even more customized and sustainable logistics services in the future. The new solution also provides better capabilities for tracking product flows, warehouse efficiency, and capacity utilization, enabling the company to offer the market even faster deliveries.
A comprehensive, end-to-end solution
Lemvigh-Müller is the market leader in Denmark in steel and technical solutions, and it handles more than 60,000 items daily at its two warehouses in Odense and Kolding. As a wholesaler, the company supplies customers across a wide range of industries, including construction, manufacturing, the public sector, and electrical and plumbing. For its new logistics project, Lemvigh-Müller has chosen KNAPP as its partner for the implementation and extensive upgrades of automation solutions and software at the new facility, making this KNAPP’s largest project in Denmark.
– We are proud that Lemvigh-Müller has entrusted us with a project of this magnitude. The future demands seamless logistics throughout the entire value chain, and our experience with this type of modernization means we can deliver a complete, end-to-end solution featuring the latest technologies,” says Mikael Holmqvist, CEO of KNAPP Nordics.
Investing in the Future of Logistics
The project involves the implementation of a 23-meter-high KNAPP Evo Shuttle solution with approximately 130,000 storage locations and 12 ergonomic "Pick-it-Easy" workstations. A 38-meter-high high-bay warehouse with space for 26,000 pallets will also be built, where pallet cranes and monorails can easily handle large volumes of pallets. Other features that contribute to making the warehouse fully automated include machines for packaging handling, robot-controlled palletizing, and semi-automatic pallet-to-pallet picking with automatic feeding of pallets from the pallet warehouse. In addition, cable-cutting machines will be implemented to enable the large-scale delivery of cables with dimensions precisely tailored to customer needs.
– Our warehouse in Kolding has been in operation since 2003 and is working exceptionally well. To future-proof our logistics and warehouse operations, we are now making the largest logistics investment in the company’s history. With our new state-of-the-art facility in Kolding, we’re ensuring that we can continue to grow and deliver even faster to our 23 stores and thousands of customers throughout Denmark. “We’re confident that our new warehouse will set us up for the future and give us a major competitive edge in the market through even better customer solutions,” explains Christian Søgaard Christensen, CEO of Lemvigh-Müller.
The partnership between KNAPP and Lemvigh-Müller dates back 20 years, which Michael Lichtenberg Crone, Head of Logistics and Production at Lemvigh-Müller, sees as a strength, especially in a project of this size.
– When you make major investments in business-critical infrastructure, you need to be absolutely certain that you’ve chosen the right supplier. Throughout the entire process, we’ve had a good gut feeling about KNAPP and the team we’ve worked with. A high level of professionalism, great chemistry, and a solid understanding of the business and our needs—that’s been our impression the whole way through. We’re completely convinced that we’ve made the right choice,” he says.
An increased focus on software
As a key part of the project, KNAPP, as a certified SAP EWM partner, has helped tailor the software solution for the warehouse in Kolding. SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) is being implemented in Lemvigh-Müller’s recently upgraded SAP S/4HANA system and forms a comprehensive solution for the entire warehouse process, with SAP EWM serving as both the WMS (Warehouse Management System) (WMS) and a Warehouse Control System (WCS) for both the manual and automated parts of the warehouse. The result is fewer interfaces and a higher degree of process optimization. KNAPP also uses a simulation system for quality assurance that enables visual testing of warehouse processes before the project goes live. The overall purpose of the new SAP EWM solution is to ensure that Lemvigh-Müller can fully leverage all the opportunities offered by the new warehouse through a single, automated, and future-proof SAP system, which enables a more comprehensive warehouse solution with automated processes from order to delivery.
