Participants of HOMAG Canada’s tour of companies at LIGNA 2011 were treated to visits at three very different businesses which use HOMAG equipment in key areas of their operations.
From the relatively small, five-employee operation ABS Office Furniture, to Heckewerth’s large panel production facility that employs 200, and last but not least adeco, a door manufacturer specializing in intricate aluminum doors – the tour offered something for everyone.
Participants learned that ABS Office Furniture, with its high degree of automation and customization focusing exclusively on one-offs and custom orders, nevertheless manages sales well in excess of $1.4 million annually with just five employees. Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that only two of the five employees actually work in the shop. The rest look after sales and marketing and running the office. The facility, which is spacious, clean and very quiet, produces orders on a weekly basis. That is every order received in a given week is produced the following week and shipped the week after that. Specialized software, some of it written in-house, makes for an efficient operation and enables them to optimize time and material use with minimal waste. Manager Hermann Brünger said their recipe for success is batch size 1 production, something that has been a trend in Europe for a few years.
At Heckewerth GmbH & Co. KG, which specializes in wooden panels, chipboard and plywood lamination, finished furniture components as well as the machining of edges and customization among other things, it was a very different pace.
Some 200 employees and a high degree of automation produce 100,000 furniture parts per week. That’s about 30 parts per minute.
Production and technology manager Udo Krantz said about 40 per cent of their production consists of furniture parts, the rest is laminated panels for RV and trailer manufacturing.
At adeco, which manfactures about 37,000 doors annually with just over 80 employees, tour participants saw a state-of-the-art production facility for door systems recognized for their timeless designs and quality. Production manager Hans-Josef Kalefeld said their product focus is on timeless elegance, quality and the symbiosis of aesthetics and innovation. "The front door should lend a home its very own prestigious character." He is also proud of the fact that for years, adeco has also been setting standards for the energy efficiency of its products.
Tour participants finished their day with a very special and memorable dinner – a traditional Teutonic feast table – at Teutonenhof in the Teutoburg Forest.
