100% Made in Germany, 5% more efficient production

KERPEN, Germany - May 8, 2025 - PRLog -- trigema, Germany's largest manufacturer of sport and leisure clothing, has significantly increased its production by converting floor stacking to rack storage. To achieve this, OHRA installed cantilever and pallet racking, providing temporary storage for the fabrics produced by the company's own knitting machines before they are sent to the finishing department for processing. Metal gratings enable the textiles to be stored in different conditions, regardless of format or storage aids. Thanks to the OHRA racking solutions, trigema has increased production efficiency by 5 per cent.

From the cotton thread to the finished T-shirt, all of trigema's textile production takes place in-house. One step in the production process is "finishing", this is where the textile is turned into the final product. This requires a number of different processes. The first stage is pre-treatment in ultra-modern washing and bleaching facilities. When the bleaching stage has been completed, the fabric is dyed in the cold-dye plant. Then it is made shrink-proof through mechanical processes.

Previously, trigema stored the fabrics in a floor stacking system between the "production" and "finishing" stages. But with increasing utilisation of the warehouse, accessing the individual articles proved to be too time-consuming. In addition, moving the textiles around frequently caused damage to the fabric. The company wanted to store their goods according to the first-in-first-out principle (FIFO), but this could only be implemented at great expense. As higher storage capacities became necessary, trigema took the opportunity to thoroughly optimise the logistics processes in the buffer warehouse.

The core of the renovation was converting floor stacking to rack storage. As storage locations were necessary for fabrics in a range of types and conditions, trigema decided to equip the warehouse with both pallet racking and cantilever racking from OHRA. In order to ensure production was not disrupted, OHRA installed the racking over the course of a weekend. The pallet racking was equipped with both chipboard shelving and metal grating, and the cantilever racking also had metal grating – this created a continuous storage surface that could accommodate a wide range of storage aids (different pallet formats, boxes or fabrics without storage aids).

In comparison to floor stacking, four racks on the same footprint offer around 60 per cent more storage capacity. Because the shelves enable direct access to each stored item, storage and retrieval processes are on average 50 per cent faster. It is also simple to implement the FIFO principle. Overall, the racks have increased production efficiency by 5 per cent.

Racking systems| Storage techology | OHRA (https://www.ohra.net/)