The family business Wulf Paletten, which is based in the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, specialized in the production of special pallets as early as in the 1970s and established itself in the packaging market over the decades of organic growth that followed. Today, Wulf Paletten mainly serves the food industry, a particularly demanding customer segment where great importance is attached to the quality of wood and reliable deliveries. “The order situation is satisfactory at the moment, but the market is losing its predictability. In the past, the Euro pallet used to be an index which provided some orientation as to the market development. Today, one has to be able to respond to requests and orders much more quickly and flexibly,” Frank Theisen tells us. He successfully runs the family business together with his wife and managing director Sabine Theisen.
Where customization is the standard
With two production lines, the company achieves an output of several thousand pallets per shift. At Wulf, you won’t find any standard or mass products, though. The smallest pallet is around 30 x 40 cm in size. “The pallet business is much more than just cutting boards to size and nailing them together. The company Reinhardt understood this from the very beginning, which is why we have been working together successfully for many decades,” Sabine Theisen says during the interview with the Holzkurier. The first Reinhardt cutting machine (the brand has been part of Paul Maschinenfabrik since 2014) was delivered when the Wulf family entered the pallet business in 1976. Numerous expansions, extensions and structural changes in the company followed.
“Our long-term collaboration is based not least on the fact that Wulf’s requirements are not standard. We at Paul Maschinenfabrik do not think in standard patterns either. In addition to our machines, what sets us apart is that we understand the requirements and needs of our customers and work closely with them to develop practical and economical plans and solutions,” Joaquín García, a long-standing sales representative at Paul Maschinenfabrik, says about the recipe for the success of the close partnership between the two companies.
Automation at a new level
Despite numerous successful projects in the past decades, Wulf’s latest investment outshines many of them. In close cooperation with Paul Maschinenfabrik, a system of automated guided vehicles (AGV) was implemented at production line one between the cutting machine and the production plant. Three autonomous forklifts ensure a smooth and, above all, error-free material transport within the tightly timed production flow.
But let’s start from the beginning: At the entrance to the production hall, everything starts as usual, with the cutting machine. A vacuum lifter lifts the boards from the lumber package layer by layer. Next, a precise number of pieces are taken from the layer to form the packages for the cross-cutting saw. These are then fed to the saw, where they are cut to length depending on the order. The raw material handling, vacuum destacking, package forming devices and saws were all supplied by Reinhardt back in 2006. As part of the most recent updates in the company, they were equipped with new software to enable them to communicate with the rest of the production plant. The update of the AGV implemented in 2022 therefore affects everything behind the exit of the cutting machine. “Four employees per shift used to stack all the boards into packages by hand and transported them to the production line by forklift,” Sabine Theisen explains and adds: “The large number of different sizes not only meant there was a relatively high potential for errors. Our employees also spent a long time looking for the right boards for the corresponding orders on the nailing machine. Thanks to Paul’s automated system, all of this is no longer an issue.” Instead of an employee, a shuttle moving on rails now takes over the lumber packages behind the saw and fills the order picking shelves. The packages are then picked up by the autonomous forklifts and are temporarily buffered at a location in the storage shelves assigned to the order. In rare cases, they are transported directly to the nailing line. The AGV system carries out all production steps – which were previously carried out laboriously by hand – completely independently.
Know-how lies in the process control
At Wulf, large batches with constant lengths and sizes are the exception. “We start with batch size one. Each pallet is produced individually according to customer’s requirements,” Frank Theisen emphasizes. As a result, process control in production is complex. “This was also the biggest challenge for our autonomous system,” García tells us. The large number of different orders significantly increases the complexity. Individual orders often consist of just a few pallet boards, which have to get to the nailing machine at the right time and precisely timed. “For reasons of time and capacity, we also often process orders in parallel on both production lines,” Frank Theisen explains. (The second production line was also modernized in 2022 and equipped with a Slimline saw from Maschinenfabrik Paul.) At the nailing machine, incoming production orders or delivery times do not determine when which order is processed. For efficiency reasons, orders are processed according to the respective board length, as this significantly reduces adjustment times on the machine. “Those details represent a major challenge for the system and must be taken into account in the entire process control, from the cutting and to the buffer and the nailing machine. It was a task that we were able to manage successfully. Today, Wulf leaves nothing to chance when it comes to the company’s smart AGV system. Every board is in the right place at the right time,” Garcia explains confidently. Theisen is also pleased: “It was a challenging project which was successfully carried out together with Maschinenfabrik Paul. Our entire production line works much more efficiently now and at the same time, there is a lower error rate. We were also able to significantly reduce the workload for our employees and gain valuable resources, which is important especially in times of a tense personnel situation.”
