Chiron Group Completes New Factory in Germany
The greenfield project represents the largest single investment in Chiron’s almost 100-year corporate history.
Chiron Group celebrated the official opening of its new Precision Factory in Neuhausen, Germany, with a number of industry and political guests. The building was constructed specifically for the assembly of new machine series. Optimized assembly and logistics processes in the plant are expected to ensure shorter delivery times.
With a maximum annual production capacity of 400 high precision machining centers, the nearly 150,000-square-foot Chiron Precision Factory was completed over 15 months. The greenfield project represents the largest single investment in Chiron’s almost 100-year corporate history.
In planning and equipping the new factory, IT experts and production planners sought to maximize digitalization of the machine production process in order to achieve high productivity and traceable assembly quality. The plant layout is designed for optimal material flow with logistics spine for all flows of people and materials; centralized final assemblies, technical offices and logistics areas; and central order picking for machines and systems.
The plant operation was also designed to be paperless. “The digital assembly folders and logistics bookings are important milestones on the road to a paperless factory,” a company spokesman said. For testing and quality assurance purposes and as a reference point, the delivery state of the machines is documented through what the company refers to as a digital fingerprint which contains all data related to each machine.
Chiron says that the factory’s design makes an important contribution towards climate protection: waste heat produced by the machines during test runs is used to heat the factory. In fact, the plant environment is controlled through a smart factory “cockpit” for managing air conditioning, lighting and camera systems.
“Here at Chiron, we are counteracting the currently difficult market environment through state-of-the-art machines and higher productivity," says Dr. Markus Flik, chairman of the board of management. “Over the last few years we have purposefully invested in further training of our skilled workforce and we are now well-equipped to produce our new series in Neuhausen.” He adds, “We built the Chiron Precision Factory specially for our new machining centers, the 16 and 25 series, currently available on the market.”
