Allit AG Kunststofftechnik

38 A beehive in warehouse form. When you enter our warehouse, you not only see an endless array of shelves, you also hear the busy whirring of forklift trucks as they bustle industriously along the alphabetically ordered corridors as if attempting to break imaginary distance records. And if you close your eyes, you can imagine yourself in a giant beehive. Our honey is our semi-finished and finished parts and merchandise, arrayed here over some 12,000 pallet racking bays. Each one is marked with a number to ensure that the apparently chaotic storage system in the individual goods sections does in fact work. This labelling system, which takes some getting used to, applies the principle of ‘free space selection’, whereby items do not have a set place, but instead are put down wherever a space happens to be free. This has the advan- tage of ensuring that disproportionate amounts of space are not occupied or spare space un- necessarily blocked. Here too, then, we prefer to keep things mobile and flexible so that we are able to operate swiftly and effectively. 13 buildings in 45 years. Building after building is arranged across our site alongside the railway tracks: warehouses, planning centres, loading bays for forwarders’ containers and the order-picking warehouse. Outdoor conveyor belts wind their way past the walls of the buildings, rather than taking up space indoors and thus hampering operations. There is a continual coming and going of lorries, pallets and merchandise. Over the past few decades we have slowly occupied the wide-open spaces of the Allit site, constructing one new building after the other, as well as extending existing ones: what started life as a 900 m² space is likely to rapidly grow into a 5,000 m² facility. One trigger for the construction of a new building was vuvuzela production in 2009, for which we erected an already-planned building in record time and stepped up production at breakneck pace from zero to 70,000 items a day. Naturally the building is now being used for other purposes than that opinion-polarising utensil for football fans. Our assembly plants put the finishing touches to what arrives on our site as granulate and leaves it configured to customers’ wishes. This