Fit for the future: the private brewery Zwettl inaugurated its new logistics center

Since 2010 the family-owned brewery invested about 15 million euros for development and modernization of the site.

The most extensive project of the brewery was an “open-heart operation”: the bottling plant and the filtration procedure were renewed and enlarged and they invested in the area of fill-up, boiler house as well as in the pressure tank area.

2013 the construction works were finished and all facilities started running. Due to these investments the brewery has a modern logistics center, an effective forklift- and truck fleet as well as a modern IT infrastructure to manage the processes.

The task

The Zwettl brewery reached their limits at the existing site:

Warehouse - “... with the existing warehouse capacity, daily business can only be handled with suboptimal processes and bottlenecks“ - citation of a brewery responsible
Production - production will require further logistics space for keg filling in the near future which will aggravate the warehouse bottleneck

Conception of a new logistics center started considering the following prerequisites:

Process optimization – projecting the logistics center only makes sense based on optimized processes and the corresponding IT support
Optimization of IT infrastructure – it had to be assured that logistics processes – especially processes between halls – could be supported adequately

The company

The private brewery Zwettl is family-owned in the fifth generation with an annual output of 193.000 hectoliters (2013); comprising 12 own products and trade goods
The market share in Austria is around 2.3%

The solution

A concept had to be developed that integrated the existing site optimally in the brewery processes.
Based on current flows of goods and growth scenarios, functional areas were dimensioned. In the planning phase, different types of storage (lengthwise vs. crosswise) and storage techniques (pallet racking, flow racks etc.) were evaluated and in cooperation with the architect the final warehouse planning was determined.
Beforehand, the future processes were structured and documented by means of process visualization. This was also the basis for the configuration of the warehouse management system.
After development and examination of different options, the plan for a new logistics center were developed and implemented in cooperation with Schulte Bender & Partner. Thereby the brewery strategy and the logistics services were ready to meet future requirements.

The result

With the new construction of the logistics center, the Zwettl brewery becomes

functionally efficient
sustainable and
equipped with an architecturally modern warehouse

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