Above: The kit factory inauguration ceremony, held on March 13, 2017. Cutting the cake are: Satair Group CEO, Bart Reijnen (middle). Satair Group VP of supply chain, Tim Bothe (left) and head of northern Germany at Goodman, Markus Meyer (right)
April 4, 2017 – Satair Group has inaugurated an additional centralized aftermarket kitting center at Hamburg to add extra capacity to its kit marshalling capability for Airbus aircraft. Opened on March 13, 2017, Satair Group’s ‘Kit Factory Unit 2’ sits adjacent to the original Kit Factory Unit 1, which opened in January 2015 and which, for the first time, consolidated all kit marshalling activities from all Airbus European sites at one centralized location.
The kit business has grown over the past few years and is a major business line for Satair Group; whether it is modification kits, repair kits or upgrade kits. A given kit consists of many different single parts that are assembled and delivered for a specific and dedicated task.
The new factory unit adds an additional 5,300 square meters of warehousing to the 10,000 square meters of Kit Factory Unit 1 to enable Satair Group to further improve its overall logistic process. This means that Satair Group will be able to more than double kit delivery performance to 110,000 kits a year in 2017, while the yearly stock picking performance will double from 1,000,000 this year to 2,000,000 over the next five years.
The two kit factories are located close to the Airbus Operations Germany site south of the River Elbe in Hamburg.The main working and kitting areas will stay in Unit 1 and the move of material into unit 2 with the extra capacity will allow Satair Group to size the productivity and capacity in line with the forecasted workload.
With Unit 2, Satair Group will also get a hazardous material (HAZMAT) area surface to store cabin upgrades monuments and upcoming retrofits for A380 and A350 programs, and the opportunity to consolidate standard hardware stock under a single roof.
Satair Group’s VP of supply chain, Tim Bothe commented, “Technologies like mobile data terminals, vertical storage machines and a packaging machine are already planned, and we are analyzing new methods in order to automate the physical kitting process going forward to create state-of-the art solutions for our customers.”