WITRON awarded contract to expand Festo’s Mason, OH RSC

WITRON Logistik + Informatik GmbH (Parkstein, Germany) has been awarded the contract to expand the logistics systems for Festo’s Mason, OH Regional Service Center. Originally built in 2015, the RSC supplies the US, Canada and Mexico with more than 20,000 line items. Festo will increase the RSC’s floor space by 127,000 square feet in 2019. WITRON will be installing and integrating two additional multi-functional picking workstations (in total 10), four additional ergonomic packing stations (in total 18), and 15,000 more AS/RS storage locations (in total 223,500) in five new aisles (in total 15). These upgrades will allow Festo to increase storage by 20 percent and pick rates by 30 percent to approximately 520 packages per hour. The expanded facility is expected to be fully operational in early 2021.

Fueled by double digit growth in North America, Festo accelerated an in-place plan expand the RSC. “Our two-digit growth in North America as well as the support of our customers on their way to digitalization has made this new investment necessary”, explains Festo Project Manager, Andreas Wiebe. “Being a full-range provider with a very high service standard worldwide, the simple technical implementation to control complexity is a crucial competitive factor. This has never been achieved by any of our competitors. Developments in an increasingly digital environment, also driven by E-Commerce, require logistics processes and logistics capacities that are geared to future requirements. With WITRON as a development partner, we see ourselves on the right track”.

WITRON and Festo partnered on the facility’s launch in 2015, and have been working together on automated distribution centers globally since 1994.