SBE-VARVIT, car components manufacturer leader, from Monfalcone in northern Italy, now enjoys improved logistics performance following an increase in production figures, thanks to a new high-bay warehouse. To achieve the required structure height, voestalpine Krems Finaltechnik GmbH’s engineers had to dig deep into the ground.
This is where most people would rather go on vacation: lots of sand, the sea is only a few steps away. However, the location and the ground presented a challenge to the erection of a high-bay warehouse.
The view from the warehouse roof is breathtaking: it is not even 400 meters to the Adriatic, the landing stages of the local rowing club appear close enough to touch. However, it is just this proximity that demands superior effort in designing the foundations of the 35-meter-high new build: the piles driven into the ground to stabilize the floor slab in the sandy subsoil also measure exactly 35 meters. “This warehouse presents almost 3,000 square meters of side wall area to the offshore winds, for a building width of only 18 meters. More depth was needed for this structurally complex task in order to implement the high-bay warehouse with the required height”, explained project manager Matthias Fitz of voestalpine Krems Finaltechnik GmbH.
The new warehouse in Monfalcone was built to resist both winds and earthquakes in order to guarantee the safety of the facility and the interaction of warehouse installation and stacker cranes at all times. Matthias Fitz: “We rely on the unique stiffness and strength of our tried-and-tested voestalpine sections – in addition, more than 193,000 connecting structural kit, provided by the customer SBE-VARVIT, ensure reliable connections.” The Austrian high-bay specialists from Krems had already erected the building’s predecessor – to the customer’s complete satisfaction, as this follow-up order demonstrates. SBE, a member of Vescovini Group SpA, European manufacturer leader for car components, needed more warehouse capacity in order to manage at the best increase in production output.
The new high-bay warehouse at the Monfalcone production facility is not only situated in an enviously beautiful landscape; from a logistics perspective, it also offers the best conditions for handling 90,000 tons of cold-formed components. The delivery deadline-sensitive processes of end customers in the automotive and mechanical engineering industries, for example, demand reliable SBE logistics. The Monfalcone warehouse, which opened in the summer of 2017, therefore represents an additional, highly automated, core logistics element of the Vescovini Group.
Company co-owner Federico Vescovini underlines the joint efforts of voestalpine Krems Finaltechnik GmbH and SBE-Varvit: “We are very satisfied with the result achieved and are pleased to have demonstrated our expertise in high-bay structural fastening systems, in cooperation with voestalpine Krems Finaltechnik GmbH. In these terms due to our experience in automotive business we defined the friction coefficients of each connecting structural kit contributed to the guaranteed highest quality in accordance with project specifications on site.”
For SBE-VARVIT, the long-term reliability of smoothly running logistics also means the documented safety of the high-bay structure. Guarantee the repetitiveness of tightening torques performance of each connecting structural kit was continuously controlled and documented by voestalpine Krems Finaltechnik GmbH. Thanks to the smooth and constructive collaboration of the two companies, the structural steelwork side of the high-bay warehouse was completed in only 18 weeks.