Milestone in CKD Centre: 750,000th truck assembly kit leaves Mercedes-Benz Wörth plant

2 MinutesBy NZ Trucking magazineApril 27, 2019

The 750,000th truck kit from the CKD Centre at the Mercedes-Benz Wörth plant was packed in a 40-foot sea container on 25 April for its journey overseas. Shortly it will be shipped to Rotterdam before being sent to Port Elizabeth, South Africa, its destination country. After being transported to East London (SA), it will be assembled at the local Mercedes-Benz plant into the complete truck: a white Actros 2652 LS 6×4, which will be delivered to its owner in mid-July.

For more than 50 years, the CKD Centre in Wörth has been sending high-quality individual truck components produced at the site to international assembly plants. The kits are assembled at the overseas locations in accordance with Mercedes-Benz‘ high quality standards. The Mercedes-Benz truck kits, which have been delivered to a total of 60 countries around the world, can consist of up to 2500 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.

CKD production at the Wörth plant started in 1966 with around 500 kits, and the first truck kits were sent to Iran. In 1969, the CKD Centre produced more than 11,000 CKD kits. Since 1978 parts kits are assembled at the CKD packaging hall with container loading.

CKD dispatch at the Wörth plant of the former Daimler-Benz AG, 1972.

Today, the CKD Centre employs about 500 people. The current portfolio of the CKD Centre includes the Mercedes-Benz Actros and Arocs, and the special Unimog and Zetros vehicles are also shipped as kits. In the course of digitalisation, the IT infrastructure in the CKD Centre is currently being converted to latest technologies so it can be controlled, picked, packed and scanned paperless in the future.

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