Fully automatic production from the raw panel to the finished cabinet: At the end of the previous year, the company Reiss Büromöbel GmbH headquartered in Bad Liebenwerda, Brandenburg, commissioned a new furniture component production. The factory is located in the Lausitz district of Bad Liebenwerda, with a new panel processing installation from IMA Schelling at the heart of the factory to enable individualized production in batch size 1 assisted by ultramodern robotic sorting technology. 

Reiss Büromöbel looks back on a long-standing, uninterrupted tradition in office furniture production. Today, the company whose founder invented the "Reiss-Brett“ (drawing board) fabricates office furniture for industrial corporations, health insurance agencies, schools and for the public authorities. In view of the digitalization of manufacturing and Industry 4.0, Reiss will invest about 30 million euros in the expansion of the two production sites. The goal is to concentrate the metal component production in the main factory in Bad Liebenwerda and to develop a specialised wood processing factory at the nearby new production site. The new building, which occupies an area of 12,500 square metres, comprises the fully automatic panel storage system, the production hall for individualized batch-size-1 production as well as the dispatch hall, office rooms, cafeteria and a showroom. 

The investment has become necessary since the old double-side edgebander did not represent the state-of-the-art any longer: excessive setup times, too much manual work including handling and transport, insufficient flexibility. The new fabrication plant uses ultra-modern technologies and intelligent machines. No operator intervention is required until the assembly stage is reached. “The new panel processing installation allows us to operate in a much more flexible way and to respond faster to orders from customers. Moreover it enables us to offer office furniture that leaves almost nothing to be desired in terms of product variability, functionalities and decorative surfaces – while at the same time reducing delivery times,” says Henning Stratmann, project manager of Reiss's new wood processing plant.

The new batch-size-1 production line, consisting of an area storage system, a panel saw, a storage system for facultative parts and a circular edge processing cell as well as the required handling and conveyor systems, has been designed and constructed by the IMA Schelling Group. The concept developed by the specialist for high-end workcell solutions in the woodworking industry has raised the benchmark for edge processing on both quality and capacity and for modern robotic sorting technology. “The robots are not only extremely efficient. They are also visually attractive,” says Henning Stratmann who will be filled with pride when guiding customers through “his” production in the future.
 

The first robotic sorting cell performs its work between the panel saw and the circular edge processing cell. A robot loads the workpieces – including facultative parts – into the sorting cell and takes them out of the cell in a predefined order. In this process, all parts with edge lengths up to 1300 mm are paired according to the intended sequence of operations before they enter the circular edge processing cell. This formation of product pairs increases the number of parts in a production run while the cycle rate stays the same. At the same time, the number of movements and hence the wear of the gantry feeder are reduced.

The workpieces are edge-banded on a single-side edgebander of the Novimat Systems type – using the glue or laser method as required. For its utilization in the Reiss office furniture production, the edgebander has been equipped with a larger grooving station. Laser edge banding is carried out by a 4.0 kW LDM diode laser. The edge-banded parts are carried by conveyor units to two additional robotic sorting cells. The robots load the parts into the sorting cell in the same order in which they come from the edge processing cell and take them out of the sorting cell in the same order in which they are going to be assembled. An upward-sloping conveyor then conveys the parts to the working height into the assembly line, starting with a combination 6-side drilling and milling machine from Priess & Horstmann. After all single components have been produced, the cabinet is pre-assembled. To this end, two carcase elements are automatically fed to the carcase press by a part feeding and turnover system; all other carcase elements, manually. 

After that, the cabinets are placed in an upright position and then transferred via a plinth panel mounting station to the final assembly area. Here, all furniture fronts and shelves are machined by the drilling machine for fronts and shelves. The parts are automatically fed from the sorting cells and moved through the drilling and fittings insertion machine using a linear axis system. Eventually, an operator completes all furniture fronts and shelves and puts them into order picking trolleys.

In order to be able to achieve frictionless production, IMA Schelling has matched the production capacity of the panel saw with that of the circular edge processing cell, which affects the layout of cutting plans and processing speeds. Buffer storage systems between the individual operations are used to compensate for small differences.