New personal protection equipment warehouse of Libus in Argentina

The Libus project in Argentina

Libus, as a company, focuses on the manufacture of specialty protective headgear for personal protection equipment (PPE). Its product portfolio includes six PPE lines: head, hearing, facial, respiratory, eye and welding protective gear. The company sells its enhanced quality products in Argentina, as well as internationally.

Libus’s production plant is located in the town of Berazategui, in Southeast Buenos Aires. The company not only makes products that it sells nationwide at this location, but it also designs and investigates new products at this centre, as per the continuous improvement protocol it has in place.

Libus has become a leading company in Argentina and its aim is to duplicate its manufacturing capacity over the next five years. To do so, it would need a new warehouse. Previously, it had a facility where it housed finished products. However, the centre’s storage capacity fell short and was not set up to absorb future increases in production.

As Ornela Matti, marketing department manager at Libus, points out “our work volume meant we had to build a new warehouse that would also be linked to our previously built centre.”

Clad-rack warehouse of Libus

The company turned their expansion project into reality by getting in touch with Mecalux because, in the words of Ornela Matti, “it puts the customer first by providing optimal services and excellent storage, picking and dispatch solutions for our goods.”

Considering the needs of Libus, Mecalux has built a 17 m high clad-rack warehouse. In this solution, the racks hold up their own weight, the weight of the stored goods, the roof and side cladding, as well as the forces exerted by the handling equipment.

The advantage of this type of warehouse is that it makes full use of every millimetre at the company’s disposal in order to get a higher storage capacity. In this case, Libus can house up to 2,340 pallets, mainly, finished and partially made products, as well as components and raw materials used in the different production processes along each work day.

The warehouse comprises five, 2 m-wide aisles with single-depth pallet racks on each side and nine storage levels in height. Operators use trilateral forklifts to insert and extract pallets from their locations. These machines only work inside the aisles, which are 31 m long.

Day in day out they receive around 150 pallets that, as per Ornela Matti, “are placed in the storage slots considering their rotation rate.” In other words, highest demand products fill the front ends of the aisles, while lower demand items fill the opposite end. At the same time, they send 50 pallets of semi-finished and raw materials to the production centre and distribute another 50 pallets to Libus’s customers throughout Argentina.

Ornela Matti - Marketing department manager at Libus
“The biggest advantage of the clad-rack warehouse Mecalux built for us is we can make the most of our warehousing space to get the storage capacity we really need. Additionally, we connected the two warehouses, which is great for business.”

Advantages for Libus

• Ample storage capacity: with the construction of the new warehouse, Libus has more room to accommodate the goods and other expected production increases down the road.
• Leveraged surface area: the racks have made full use of the 800 m² available to the company. Additionally, aisles are only 2 m wide to provide a higher capacity: up to 2,340 pallets.
• Improvements without service reductions: Mecalux has optimised the Libus logistics centre without the company having to stop serving its customers at any point during the process.