Goodbye Rhineland-Palatinate, hello South Africa: The 750,000th truck kit from the CKD Center (= Completely Knocked Down) at the Mercedes-Benz Wörth plant was packed today in a 40-foot sea container for its journey overseas. Shortly it will be shipped to Rotterdam before it embarks to Port Elizabeth/ South Africa, its destination country. After being transported to East London, it will be assembled at the local Mercedes-Benz plant into the complete truck: a white Actros 2652 LS 6×4, which is expected to be delivered to its owner in mid-July.
Since more than 50 years, the CKD Center in Wörth stands for the successful implementation of its original concept of “shipping quality”. Since 1966, the center sends high-quality individual truck components produced at the site to the international assembly plants. The kits are assembled reliably and flexibly at the foreign locations in accordance with Mercedes-Benz’ high quality standards. The Mercedes-Benz truck kits, which have been delivered since the founding of the CKD Center to a total of 60 countries around the world can consist of up to 2,500 individual components.
In order to keep operations, processes and handling as efficient as possible, sets of four identical trucks are usually packed together, which in most cases also fit into four overseas containers. Such a four-packed set consists of a total of 48 packages and weighs between 50 and 70 tons, depending on the design. The re-usable packaging is individually produced in the CKD Center from cardboard and wood to guarantee resource savings.
The experienced production team from Wörth plays an important part in safeguarding these strict quality requirements all over the world. The specialists in Wörth regularly support colleagues at foreign plants with production start-ups, for example, as part of special training programs. Thus, as the CKD Center of competence Wörth plays a key role in the international Mercedes-Benz Trucks Production Network.
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SOURCE: Daimler
