1. Company
2. Media
3. Press articles
4. Press Releases

06/07/2016

KHS expands its Kleve site: additional assembly shop blessed

A new building signifies permanent expansion at KHS GmbH's packaging machine plant in Kleve, Germany, where the company recently held a topping-out ceremony and had its new assembly shop blessed.

• Company expands by 2,500 m2
• Blessing and topping out ceremony for new assembly shop
• Steady site growth of over 10%

Kleve, June 7, 2016 – A new building signifies permanent expansion at KHS GmbH's packaging machine plant in Kleve, Germany, where the company recently held a topping-out ceremony and had its new assembly shop blessed. The manufacturer of filling and packaging systems is very excited about the additional 2,500 m2 in capacity it will gain, as recently space has been tight. "The new shop impressively proves how high the demand is for our products from Kleve," smiles Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Niemeyer, chairman of the KHS Executive Management Board. "We're very pleased with the continuing growth of this production site throughout the entire KHS Group." In the past few years alone business in Kleve has grown on average by more than 10% per annum. A similar trend is emerging for 2016. Capacities bundled at the site In the town of Kleve (English Cleves) on the Lower Rhine KHS manufactures packaging systems for food and beverage producers from all over the world. With the expansion the systems provider is again bundling capacities on its own factory premises. To date the plant had 13 staging areas for final assembly and system testing; owing to its considerable growth, however, the manufacturer no longer had enough assembly space at its disposal. "When running at peak capacity we always had to rent out shop space in the neighborhood," reports Norbert Pastoors, head of the Packaging Product Division at KHS, "and in the last two years we even had this extra space permanently booked." The external workstations meant a lot of extra work: on the one hand, transporting the complex machine components from one site to another presented ever greater logistical challenges; on the other, assembly conditions at the rented sites were improvised and not linked in to the company's own, optimized infrastructure and in-house facilities. "The new shop not only saves us a lot of time but also money – to the tune of about €200,000 a year," says Pastoors happily. Seven extra staging areas for assembly and acceptance testing The new assembly shop will permanently provide additional final assembly and testing bays for Kleve’s products which are very successful on the market, giving the factory a total of 20 final assembly workstations. KHS is thus expanding on its own company site; it was not necessary to buy up extra land. Production at the new shop in Kleve is to start in August. KHS held a topping-out ceremony during its traditional family afternoon, with all company employees, retired KHS personnel and the craftsmen involved in the project invited. Deacon Michael Rübo, managing director of the Karl und Maria Kisters Stiftung, performed the official blessing ceremony following speeches given by Sonja Northing, mayor of Kleve, and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Niemeyer. About the KHS Group The KHS Group is one of the leading manufacturers of filling and packaging systems for the beverage, food and non-food industries. The KHS Group includes the following companies, among others: KHS GmbH, KHS Corpoplast GmbH, KHS Plasmax GmbH and NMP Systems GmbH. KHS GmbH manufactures modern filling and packaging systems at its headquarters in Dortmund, Germany, and in Kleve, Bad Kreuznach and Worms. The KHS Group's PET expertise is pooled at KHS Corpoplast and KHS Plasmax in Hamburg, Germany, where light PET packaging and innovative coating systems are developed and produced. NMP Systems GmbH, a wholly-owned subsidiary of KHS GmbH based in Düsseldorf in Germany, designs and markets new, resource-saving packaging systems for PET bottles. The group has an international production and service network. In 2015 KHS was awarded the Top 100 seal of approval for exceptional innovative power and outstanding innovative success among German SMEs. In 2015 the KHS Group and its 4,871 employees achieved a turnover of around €1.172 billion within the Salzgitter consolidation. The companies in the KHS Group are 100% subsidiaries of the MDAX-listed Salzgitter AG corporation.