Filling on demand: our repack room in Lommel (BE) in action

When two parties know, understand and complement each other, project management becomes a breeze. Also when it involves moving stocks to a new warehousing site and implementing value added services. For this International Project Management Day, we want to highlight our collaboration with Givaudan, and specifically how we use the repack room at our new Lommel site to provide them with filling on demand services.

Room to grow

Givaudan is the world’s largest producer of flavours and fragrances for use in food and beverages, cosmetics and household products. The company has been relying on H.Essers for the storage of its goods, mainly liquids, for a long time. Pallets used to be stored in Genk. To further grow its business, Givaudan needed more warehousing space.

“We started looking for an adequate location and we proposed to move all stocks to our new warehousing site in Lommel, which was yet to be built”, explains Peter Istas, Project Engineer Value Added Services at H.Essers. “This move was the first scope of the project that needed managing. With construction complete, Givaudan now has a storage capacity of 3,000 pallets. Their liquids are stored in 1,000-litre IBCs or 200-litre drums, but Givaudan’s customers often order smaller quantities. So, we developped a repacking room to give the company the flexibility to ship smaller containers to its customers – the second scope of this project.”

Providing flexibility

“The repack room became operational in May 2023 and we’re scaling up the activities in waves. Today, we’re doing 100 repacks a day, and the goal is to increase that number to 200 per day. The repack room features specialised equipment to transfer liquids from ICBs or drums to smaller containers with volumes ranging from 1 litre to 200 litres. We only repack the volumes that Givaudan has actually sold. If, for instance, we receive the order to fill two 1-litre packs, our operators pick an IBC or a drum from the warehouse, fill the packs, and move the large container back to storage. This is all manual work and requires quite some pallet movements, so we consolidate orders to optimise workflows. Afterwards, our operators prepare the containers for shipping and load the trucks.”

A successful collaboration

This project with a double scope became a success thanks to the close collaboration between the project managers and teams on both sides. “My counterpart at Givaudan and I have been in close contact with each other since day one and served as single point of contact. This meant that any issues were quickly resolved. Now that the operation is up and running, the number of repacks will continue to increase. I’ve seldomly seen such a good and smooth collaboration”, Peter concludes.

Would you like to know more about our solutions for chemical logistics? Please contact our Global Industry Lead Chemicals, Maarten Goossens: maarten.goossens@essers.com.