Photo: Kion
Kion has opened its Center of Excellence for automation solutions in Antwerp, Belgium. It is intended to become the most important location for research and development, testing, and customer-specific production in EMEA. Employees from Kion's various brands will work together there on projects across different teams.
The Kion Automation Center Antwerp employs around 400 people from various disciplines and 40 nationalities. The 11,800-square-meter building is designed for collaborative work, with a flexible office concept intended to foster creative thinking, mutual learning, joint testing, and knowledge transfer. The building is located near the Port of Antwerp in an industrial area that is slated for growth and development in the coming years.
“Automation is the future of our industry, which is why I am delighted about the opening of this new location,” said Ching Pong Quek, Member of the Executive Board and Chief Technology Officer of the KION Group. “By bringing together various teams and areas of expertise under one roof, we can respond to market needs and implement automation projects faster, more innovatively, and more cost-effectively. The teams develop the right automation solutions for our customers and support our regional sales teams.” The new building makes it possible to test and optimize new solutions on-site and to respond quickly and individually to requirements. “The Center of Excellence facilitates intensive collaboration across business units,” Quek added.
The employees who previously worked at the two rented locations in Antwerp and Zwijndrecht have now moved into the new Kion Automation Center. This shortens distances and promotes cross-departmental collaboration between teams. Dematic, a Kion subsidiary and automation and software specialist, only needed to move a few meters from its previous office to the nearby new center. The team now offers automation solutions to customers throughout Europe.
In addition to Dematic, other Kion operating units are also housed in the new building. One of these is Kion Industrial Trucks and Services (ITS) EMEA. The Antwerp team handles customer projects – from planning to delivery – as well as training courses held on-site. Other key areas include testing and developing customer-specific hardware and software solutions, and producing custom solutions, particularly for industrial trucks.
Robotic systems will play a key role in the new automation center. The team there will develop intelligent, industrialized, driverless, and interoperable robotic products, solutions, and services that are easy to install, operate, and maintain in brownfield applications – and will support these applications throughout their entire lifecycle.
The new Kion Automation Center in Antwerp features modern standards for sustainable design, including solar panels and a green roof. The goal is to achieve BREEAM certification for sustainable buildings, which is based on a holistic approach to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability, health, and net-zero emissions targets. Furthermore, the Kion Group is working closely with the European agency Encon to obtain a WELL Gold certificate from the international WELL Building Institute, based in the USA. The WELL Building Standard is an evidence-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring building characteristics that impact the working environment of employees.
At the end of 2023, more than 1.8 million KION industrial trucks were in operation at customer sites across numerous industries on six continents. The company currently employs more than 42,000 people and generated sales of approximately €11.4 billion in 2023.
