The long-standing ceramic provider, Villeroy&Boch Tiles, celebrated the topping-out ceremony of its new logistics center in Polch on Wednesday, July 26. This highly modern facility represents a crucial milestone in the company’s strategic realignment and will significantly enhance Villeroy&Boch Tiles’ customer service capabilities.
The DGNB Gold-certified building boasts approximately 40,000 square meters of warehouse space (equivalent to roughly 5.5 soccer fields) and features highly automated storage technology, ensuring reliable reductions in delivery times and sustained product availability.
With our new logistics center, we have the capability to perform the picking, storage, and packaging of our tiles with greater precision and efficiency,” says Dirk Wuschech, responsible for Supply Chain Management at Villeroy&Boch Tiles. This is made possible through complete automation: a driverless transport system (FTS) will digitally control and autonomously execute logistics at the new Polch warehouse from goods receipt to dispatch. To optimize storage capacity, high shelves reaching a height of 11.5 meters will be used. These shelves are designed as rack storage with individual item retrieval capability, yet due to their efficient layout, they occupy less than half of the previous space. Additionally, Villeroy&Boch Tiles is making a clear commitment to sustainability with the new logistics site: a 5 MW photovoltaic system will be installed on the building’s roof, and thanks to significantly shorter transport routes, the company’s carbon dioxide emissions in Germany are projected to be reduced by over 12% (or 620 tons of CO²) annually. “We are moving from a facility built in 1875 in Merzig to Polch in the year 2024,” says Wuschech. “With the new warehouse, we are staying in tune with the times.”
The commissioning of the new logistics center in Polch is part of an extensive transformation process that V&B Fliesen GmbH has been undergoing since 2020, with the goal of consistently ensuring the company’s new customer-centric approach. “We aim to shape the future together with our customers,” says Dr. Jörg Schwall, CEO of V&B Fliesen. “The highly automated equipment in the Polch logistics center is a crucial step in being even more responsive to our customers’ needs in the future.” As part of the repositioning of the Villeroy&Boch Tiles brand to strengthen the core business, further measures include optimizing product ranges and marketing, consolidating production capabilities with the financially strong international Eczacıbaşı Holding, and the impending relocation of the headquarters to a modern office complex in Merzig. The transformation process of V&B Fliesen GmbH is expected to be largely completed by 2024, with the first tiles from Polch set to be delivered to customers starting in early 2024.
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