At this year’s SMTconnect in Nuremberg, the Otto Künnecke Group is showcasing its Magic Tower storage system. “We first presented ourselves at Productronica in 2021 after acquiring Mimot GmbH. Since then, we’ve gained significant experience in electronics manufacturing. Even though we’re presenting the Magic Tower again this year, our focus goes beyond simply selling a storage system,” says Niklas Künnecke, Managing Director of Otto Künnecke Customer Service GmbH.
The nearly 90-year-old business has established itself over the decades in other industries as a classic family-run company: operating globally, yet maintaining close sales and service structures to its customers; always in search of innovative and customized machine solutions to meet the challenges of today’s and tomorrow’s production processes—true to the company motto “Ideas create solutions.”
“We’ve realized that the DNA that defines Otto Künnecke is also the key to success in material management and intralogistics in electronics manufacturing,” explains Künnecke. He adds: “Of course, it matters how many reels fit into a storage system. But that number is irrelevant without a coherent materials management concept. We help our customers develop such a concept, just as we have successfully done for decades in other industries.”
The focus is on material flow from goods receipt to the assembly line. Together with customers, Künnecke and his team thoroughly analyze each transport step of a component reel—right up to the placement machine. Questions such as when and how the reels are delivered to the line, how they are stored at the line, whether they are fed directly to the feeder, whether all reels even need to be stored, and how intermediate and main warehouses function, are carefully examined. These considerations lead to both a warehouse structure and a picking concept. “In the end, from an initial 8,000 reels, maybe only 4,000 need to be stored in a fully automated system that complies with MSL standards. Naturally, this changes both the cost and the effort needed to design and implement such a storage solution,” Künnecke emphasizes.
Künnecke knows that medium-sized electronics manufacturers often hesitate due to the perceived costs of a storage system. But frequently, they calculate based on the total number of component reels that could be stored. “This is exactly what customers need to rethink. Storing the total number isn’t sensible. That’s where we step in as partners and work hand-in-hand with our clients on these projects to clarify what’s really necessary to achieve an efficient storage system within their existing structures,” says Künnecke. His approach is based on decades of project experience.
The resulting concepts are tailored to each company’s internal structures and the available space within the warehouse and production area.
“If a customer wants to start small, that’s not a problem for us,” assures Künnecke. This philosophy also applies to the Magic Tower. It’s a fully automated, scalable, and modular storage and picking system for SMD components, offering fully automated storage and retrieval with complete traceability. “We can store over 100,000 reels in the Magic Tower—but again, that’s not the point. It’s really about providing customers with an economically viable storage concept today that can be modularly adapted to future changes,” Künnecke continues.
By using the Magic Tower, manual interventions are minimized within Otto Künnecke’s overall concept. The freely configurable storage system can be equipped with a wide range of additional modules. Thanks to this unique and extensive flexibility, the Magic Tower grows sustainably with evolving requirements and can be expanded in functionality and size at any time. The consistently database-driven system features interfaces to numerous ERP and MES systems and ensures complete traceability of each individual reel.