Estrella de Levante & E80 Group: a vision focused on innovation and constant growth
With more than 5,000 employees and a presence in over 130 countries, Damm Group is a beer producer founded in 1876 in Barcelona, built on strong roots and values, passion for its products and territory, innovation, and people.
The beer market is constantly evolving, and Spain is home to some of the largest breweries in Europe, recording 11% growth since 2017 with 41.5 hectoliters produced in 2023.
Estrella de Levante - Espinardo, Murcia
Over the years, Damm expanded with the establishment of Estrella de Levante, which opened its first plant in Murcia in 1963, reaching a production of 8 million liters of beer that same year. With a vision focused on innovation and constant growth, Estrella de Levante began automating its operations in the 1990s.
The partnership between Damm and E80 Group extended to the Estrella de Levante brewery, where 12 laser-guided vehicles were introduced in 2022 to manage four different types of pallets — raw materials, kegs, reusable products, and disposable products — and 30 different SKUs.
“There were four main reasons for implementing this system: to optimize the processes, to improve productivity and efficiency, to reduce waste, and to ensure total traceability of our products from the moment they leave the packaging lines until they reach our logistics warehouse, located 7 miles away,” explains Jesús Hidalgo Pérez, Plant Manager at Estrella de Levante.
The installation of the LGVs was preceded by a thorough analysis of Estrella de Levante's requirements and the determination of the most suitable technological solutions to address them in a flexible and strategic manner. The ability of E80 Group's LGVs to combine all the operational flows and ensure highly efficient warehouse management was a decisive factor in their selection.
“The efficiency and availability of the LGV vehicles within the plant exceed 95%,” continues Jesús Hidalgo, “covering all the operations of our automatic loading and unloading systems, the feeding of our lines, and the corresponding output of all the finished products in their various formats: drums, cans, returnable glass, and disposable glass.”
In addition to guaranteeing flexibility and high performance, the LGVs are a key factor in plant safety. The vehicles are equipped with devices compliant with the current regulations and use environmental navigation, a technology that allows them to orient themselves by exploiting the physical features of their surroundings, such as walls and shelving, in all areas where signal reflection by mirrors cannot be detected, as in the case of the 9-level block storage units.
In fact, Jesús Hidalgo Pérez points out that "The logistics automation of the plant has enhanced our entire intralogistics chain and every single process. Loading and unloading times have decreased, increasing the availability of our equipment and many of our processes; our product traceability has improved, making it complete and monitorable in real time throughout every stage; the waste and human errors that sometimes previously occurred have been reduced.”
The partnership between Damm Group and E80 Group has continued for more than 18 years, and has always been defined by the shared pursuit of innovative challenges and objectives, developing solutions that not only meet the needs of today, but, above all, those of tomorrow.