This year’s winners of the Supply Chain Award and the Smart Solutions Award were honoured on 10 November in the context of the EXCHAiNGE 2020 trade fair. The latter was won by Schubert Additive Solutions GmbH for its “PARTBOX” part streaming platform. It enables the 3D printing of format, spare and wear parts at the touch of a button directly at the customer’s site. The smart, attractively priced solution from the Schubert Group’s Crailsheim-based company impressed both the trade and public jury of the awarding LOGISTIK HEUTE trade journal.

In the vote, the specialist for additive manufacturing technology prevailed against projects from strong competitors such as Heureka Business Solutions, Daimler Trucks and Waku Robotics. “We are very proud that the PARTBOX was chosen and honoured as a smart solution by the experts at EXCHAiNGE. This attests to the fact that Logistics 4.0 is more than the digitalisation of material flows and the automation of systems and processes,” said Marcus Schindler, Managing Director of Schubert Additive Solutions GmbH. “The intelligent networking of different areas, in our case production with logistics, is the key to this. In addition to better and more efficiently designed parts, 3D printing also opens up new perspectives with tangible benefits for logistics.”

MANUFACTURING WITH A STANDARD 3D PRINTER The keyword here is Manufacturing on Demand: As electronic design data can be retrieved on demand in seconds and produced anywhere in the world. The young spin-off of packaging machine manufacturer Gerhard Schubert GmbH provides access to tested and manufacturer-certified print data. Customers only need a standard filament 3D printer and the PARTBOX, which has LTE access, and which is directly and securely connected to the digital warehouse. True to the Click & Print principle, format parts, spare and wear parts can be produced by anyone in any desired batch. Schubert Additive Solutions also supports its customers with its services for all aspects of additive manufacturing, drawing on its experience with more than 120,000 additive-produced components in house.

The team at Schubert Additive Solutions is convinced that at some point it will be the norm to send data to customers instead of manufactured components. “With this in mind, we are working at full speed on this vision of decentralised manufacturing. This award confirms that we are on the right track,” Schindler continued. Jury member Harald Geimer, Partner at PwC Management Consulting, believes that PARTBOX even has great potential to revolutionise the supply chain and storage of spare parts: “At the same time, the company places great emphasis on the protection of intellectual property when using its part streaming platform. This can be a future-proof solution, especially in the case of growing demand for customer-specific products and the resulting diversity of variants.” Jury member Dr Petra Seebauer, co-publisher of the LOGISTIK HEUTE trade magazine, agrees and adds: “Schubert’s industrial 3D printing platform provides customers with often more cost-effective and faster procurement of spare or wear parts. Moreover, savings in transportation have a positive effect on the environment and sustainability.”

ABOUT THE SMART SOLUTION AWARD The Smart Solution Award takes place during the annual “EXCHAiNGE – The Supply Chainers Community” international conference and is awarded for exceptionally innovative concepts which are still in the early stages of implementation. This prize highlights solutions that have the potential to fundamentally change traditional value chains in the future. In 2020, the award was presented for the third time; the previous winners were parcelLab (2019) and InstaFreight (2018).