Vision 2020 – the Wilo Campus Dortmund

Dortmund is to become the number one digital location. The Wilo Group has declared its continued commitment to its headquarters and the city of Dortmund as a growing technology and science location with the greatest site development project in the company’s 146 year history. New working environments will be created in an area stretching over 190,000 square metres. A production facility of the future. An efficient and sustainable administration building. A new site – the Wilo Campus Dortmund.

In 1872, Dortmund was characterised by mining and the iron and steel industry. Westphalia’s industrial core. In 1872, the company founder, Caspar Ludwig Opländer started out with a backstreet workshop in the centre of Dortmund. With the beginning of the twentieth century, the company moved into a bigger factory building in today’s Ardeystraße (former ‘Hohe Straße’). Then, Wilo finally moved to its current headquarters in Nortkirchenstraße. In 2022, Wilo will reinvent itself for its 150th anniversary. Starting with a new plant structure on a twenty-hectare site to represent what Wilo is today: one of the leading premium suppliers of pumps and pump systems worldwide, employing over 7,600 staff across the globe. The greatest site development project in the company’s history. Four main buildings on one plot which is roughly the size of 26 football pitches. The space required will be obtained by acquisitions with the company divesting itself of the existing buildings from the nineteen-sixties. The new buildings will be more sustainable and more efficient than any of its predecessors. The Wiloop will form the “heart” of the site. “The Wiloop connects the most important buildings. The Smart Factory containing the production, the Office for the administration, the Project House containing product development, Customer Interface for customer contact and the Children & Healthcare Center for the employees,” says Martin Linge-Boom, Corporate Real Estate Management at Wilo. “However, it is also intended as a central meeting place for our employees.” The buildings will be connected and accessed via the Nortkirchenstraße, which will be transfigured into an avenue, the works’ own Campus-Allee. Wilo will be keeping its traditional address, Nortkirchenstraße 100. The new avenue will remain accessible to employees, visitors and public transport. Through traffic to Dortmund-Hörde will be rerouted in the north, with logistics gaining a dedicated access road. For efficient building use, rainwater from the outdoor facilities and from over 70,000 square metre roof surface will be collected and held in rainwater storage channels. Subsequently, it will be used for irrigation, cooling or fed into a brook (Pferdebach) to the south of the buildings via a system of culverts, pump systems and expanses of water. This water continues to flow into the Emscher river and aids renaturation by supplying clean water. The roof surfaces are also vegetated, thus forming a natural retention space. These measures also afford a natural cooling effect. The primary power requirements can be covered to a large extent by the 10,000 square metres. Heat recovery and intelligent synergies as well as holistic energy monitoring and management are all part of the WILO SE sustainability concept. Media such as electricity, heating and cooling are provided centrally via efficient systems and a distribution network.

The Smart Factory: The production facility of the future
The production facility is the foundation of the technology company. The modern, communicative workplaces should not just be accessible to the employees in administration as, increasingly, the focus is being placed on them even in the Smart Factory. The spacious factory foyer will be the starting point for visitor tours. Through the glass-walled technical centre in the centre of the building it is possible to gain an insight into the ongoing production. Visitors can go on a “skywalk” through the production hall across a walkway, which connects the administrative units internally. Transparency is an important component of the new site. “The intention is to remove the barriers between the individual workstations and create space for an open working culture,” explained Linge-Boom. “The production planners and production managers, for example, have an unhindered view, straight into production from the offices near to the production areas on the first floor. The production employees, however, also have direct contact to controlling and material planning.” Besides the office areas in the peripheral structures of the building, in future, there will also be office units located on the shop floor to ensure that communication between manufacturing and production planning is as direct and quick as possible. There are communication areas on the entire shop floor to foster communication between the individual working groups.

The Office – efficient, sustainable, flexible, open
The pump manufacturer’s new administration combines the fundamental administration areas of the group functions. Particular aspects which were taken into account in the construction of the Office were the sustainability of the buildings and the use of the land in accordance with the Green Building Standards of the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) Gold certificate and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certificate. The transparent shell ensures maximum utilisation of daylight and natural lighting of all workstations. At the same time it still fulfils all the requirements of a highly efficient, energy saving and resource saving building. The Office is split into bustling and shared spaces at the base and quieter working areas in the wings and upper floors. The ground floor is the event and communication zone and features a canteen and cafés, but also accommodates the central meeting point in the foyer. Open stairs lead to the first floor with its meeting and conference areas where there are further options for formal and informal communication, teamwork, seminars and events. The office spaces are situated in the two wings on each of the floors above, which are arranged in the manner of a modern working environment, providing room for differing working styles. The expression of the “Wilo Future Office” concept is the provision of spaces for communicative teamwork and so-called “hot desks”. These are workstations that can be shared by several employees and can be chosen on a daily basis, as required. These spaces are created in the centre and concentration areas in the wings.

At the moment, the structural work for the Smart Factory is currently underway in the southern part of Dortmund, parallel to the last soil preparation work: “At the same time we finalized the tenders for the building services and other interior finishing work ", says Holger Herchenhein, Senior Vice President, Group Quality & Qualification at Wilo. “Thus, we are now starting with the hot phase of finding service providers and partners for further work."