Repurposed: former ammunition depot becomes ETH warehouse
Due to an acute lack of space in the centre, the Department of Earth Sciences was looking for new storage space. Together with the Campus Services storage team, a former army ammunition depot has now been converted. Over thirty Euro pallets are already stored in the new high racks.
Claudio Madonna sits at his desk in the NO building on Sonneggstrasse and gazes intently at the screen in front of him. He is the head of the Rock Physics and Mechanics Laboratory at the Geological Institute of the Department of Earth Sciences. "Before we were able to move to Herrliberg, we had to store laboratory materials, spare parts and drill cores wherever we had space available in our buildings. That was rather suboptimal," explains Madonna and smiles. He opens a presentation entitled ZLB, which is what the ammunition depot Zääjuten, built in 1981, is now called in ETH jargon.
The depot itself is an inconspicuous place. All you can see from the access road in the forest above Herrliberg are four large garage doors. Behind them is a wide loading ramp, from which heavy metal doors lead to the two storage rooms, each built over forty metres into the mountain. The first room has been used for some time by the department to store drill cores.
Utilising what is there
Fabian Fröhlich and his team were tasked with making the rooms in the second part of the building usable. "After an initial on-site inspection and a short planning phase, we then set up over 300 pallet spaces up there," reports Fröhlich. Storage racks were installed and systematically labelled. This means that each item has a traceable storage location. For the core drillings, which are over two metres long, and large machines that do not fit into the racks, appropriate floor storage spaces were created.
“Especially the automated process for storage and retrieval is a real added value for us.”Claudio Madonna
Automated and centrally managed
Once Fröhlich and his team had set up the second room according to the researchers' needs, the storage and retrieval still had to be coordinated. Together, they developed a new process that allows the department's employees to simply register storage orders, including the necessary transport, using an online form. "The new solution simplifies our work and we always know where our items are stored when we need them," explains Madonna.
The Campus Services warehouse team manages over 5000 m2 of storage space at various locations in Switzerland. All relevant information on the use of this space by ETH units is available in the Logistics Help Centre.
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