A New Product Every Three Days”, Stainless Steel Cable Gland writes the German daily newspaper ‘Die Welt‘ following a visit by one of its reporters to HellermannTyton in Tornesch, Germany – one of twelve production sites around the globe. What might at first sound like a fanciful boast is reality at HellermannTyton. Over 60,000 items make up the company’s vast palette of cable management solutions, and the number is growing continuously.

Producing a new product every three days means a lot of tightly coordinated processes, so let’s take a look at what’s behind this figure to understand how this frequency is possible. Two important points to keep in mind are how technologies help assure quality and efficiencies, and HellermannTyton’s philosophy of being close to customers.

A walk through the company site in Tornesch leaves the visitor with one very striking impression: this is a highly automated business. As ‘Die Welt’ points out in the article, many of HellermannTyton’s products are manufactured using the same principle. Granulated plastics are heated to liquid form, injected under extreme pressure into a mould and leave the machine a moment later as a quality finished product. Often, an employee only needs to get involved in the production process in order to change a particular product mould, or to replace the container receiving the end product. Automation – or automated product platforms, to borrow a term from the automotive industry – helps to ensure that all key parameters for a product are met consistently. And this contributes to quality assurance.

Automation on this scale, however, is a feature across the entire company. At night, when most employees are already at home, automated warehousing machines are busily whirring along rows of packaged products stacked to the ceiling of the high bay warehouse shelves. These "robots” are using off-peak production phases to optimize the storage of products. When warehouse employees arrive for work the next morning they find the boxes, containers and palettes arranged in their best possible location for fast access and dispatch to customers that day. This saves time and frees up resources for tasks that are better performed by people – such as understanding and serving customers’ needs.

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