Festo US, Islandia, N.Y., announced plans to expand its Mason, Ohio, regional service center.

Originally built in 2015, the regional service center supplies more than 20,000 line items to the United States, Canada and Mexico. Festo will increase the floor space by 127,000 square feet. 

WITRON Logistik + Informatik GmbH, Germany, will expand the logistics systems and integrate two additional multi-functional picking workstations (10 total), four additional ergonomic packing stations (18 total) and 15,000 more automated storage and retrieval system storage locations (223,500 total) in five new aisles. These upgrades will allow Festo to increase storage by 20% and pick rates by 30% to approximately 520 packages per hour. The expanded facility is expected to be fully operational in early 2021.

“Our 2-digit growth in North America as well as the support of our customers on their way to digitalization has made this new investment necessary,” says Andreas Wiebe, project manager for Festo. “Being a full-range provider with a very high service standard worldwide, the simple technical implementation to control complexity is a crucial competitive factor. This has never been achieved by any of our competitors. Developments in an increasingly digital environment, also driven by e-commerce, require logistics processes and logistics capacities that are geared to future requirements. With WITRON as a development partner, we see ourselves on the right track”.

Festo and WITRON partnered on the facility’s launch in 2015, and have been working together on automated distribution centers globally since 1994.