Slovenian engineering company completes automated opera warehouse in Germany

Slovenian engineering company Riko has designed and built a new digitalised scenery warehouse for the Bavarian State Opera in cooperation with several partners in a project worth €15 million, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

Riko designed, supplied and installed a steel racking structure with 450 storage locations for special stage set containers, along with the roof and facade, a lifting platform for delivery and dispatch of the containers, and an automatic rack crane specifically developed to handle these containers.

The company also provided transport systems and 186 containers. Located in Poing near Munich, the new scenery warehouse is automated to the extent that it is operated by only one worker. Riko will also provide maintenance services for four years.

Riko's main subcontractors on the project were Slovenian companies Iskra Impuls, Monter Kocjan, and Schwarzmann, as well as Germany's Büter Hebetechnik and Altmann. It took them three years to complete the project.

As the new facility was inaugurated, Bavaria's State Minister for Science and Arts Markus Blume said it was an important asset for Bavarian culture.

Serge Dorny, director-general of the Bavarian State Opera, told the Slovenian Press Agency the new warehouse was essential for the operation of such an opera theatre.

"Our programme is very extensive, so we need appropriate storage facilities. It's hard to imagine our work without them." He said there were only a few such digitalised warehouses in the world.

Both German officials praised cooperation with the Slovenian partners. "They have the know-how, are efficient and extremely reliable," Dorny said about Riko.

"Cooperation with the partners from Slovenia was excellent and couldn't be better. And the work has been done within the deadlines and the budget," Blume said.

Riko director Janez Škrabec said working with such an esteemed German institution was a major challenge.

"We know Bavaria is a logistics hub, that all our competitors are here, which makes it all the more flattering that we won such a project in such competitive conditions and that everyone is very pleased with us."

The project is entirely tailored to the needs of the client, which makes it an important reference for Riko's future business opportunities in Slovenia and abroad.