Mercedes-Benz’s Worth plant despatches 750,000th truck assembly kit 

On April 26, the 750,000th truck kit from the CKD Center (Completely Knocked Down) at the Mercedes-Benz Worth plant was packed in a 40-foot sea container for its journey overseas. It will soon 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 6x4, which is expected to be delivered to its owner in mid-July.

The Mercedes-Benz plant in Worth also has more than 50 years of experience in CKD production, and delivers vehicle kits to numerous overseas markets for local final assembly. The CKD Center in Worth has been shipping 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’s 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 Worth plays an important part in safeguarding these strict quality requirements all over the world. The specialists in Worth regularly support colleagues at foreign plants with production start-ups, for example, as part of special training programs.

Taking the digital route
CKD production at the Worth plant started in 1966 with around 500 kits. The first truck kits were sent to Iran. In 1969, the CKD Center produced more than 11,000 CKD kits for the first time. Since 1978 parts kits are assembled at the CKD packaging hall with container loading. Today, the CKD Center in Wörth employs about 500 people.

The current portfolio of the CKD Center in Worth includes the Mercedes-Benz Actros and Arocs in the fields of road and construction site transport. The special Unimog and Zetros vehicles are also shipped as kits. In the course of digitalisation, the IT infastructure in the CKD Center is currently being converted to latest technologies so it can be controlled, picked, packed and scanned paperless and using handhelds in the future.