Satair Group opens new Airbus aftermarket centralised kitting centre at Hamburg to double delivery capacity

Satair Group has inaugurated an additional centralised aftermarket kitting centre at Hamburg to add significant extra capacity to its already impressive kit marshalling capability for Airbus aircraft and to achieve another milestone in the logistic & supply chain history of Airbus and Satair Group.

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 centralised location.

The new Kit Factory Unit 2 adds an additional 5,300 m² of warehousing to the 10,000 m² 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.

Satair Group’s VP of Supply Chain, Tim Bothe comments: “The Satair Group Kit Factory is the centralised worldwide kitting centre for the Airbus and Satair Group aftersales business. The new construction was kicked off in June 2016 and just nine months later we were ready for the inauguration. This is typical of our highly dynamic business environment where growth has to take place within a very short time frame to support our customers”.

The kit business has increased dramatically in the past few years and it 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 combined Kit factories, Units 1 and 2, are 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.

Within Unit 2 Satair Group will also get a Hazardous Material (HAZMAT) area surface to store the Cabin Upgrades Monuments* and the upcoming retrofits for the A380 and A350 programmes and, last but not least, the opportunity to consolidate the Standard Hardware stock under a single roof.

Tim Bothe ends: “Technologies like Mobile Data Terminals, Vertical Storage Machines and a packaging machine are already planned and we are analysing new methods in order to automate the physical kitting process going forward to create state-of-the art solutions for our customers.”

*cabin upgrades monuments are large items such as lavatories and galleys, or for business aircraft large ottoman seats, partitions and bar units.