Rather than relocating fixed workstations or making costly trial-and-error changes on the shop floor, hub4industry, working with an expert from Cracow University of Technology, built a dynamic simulation of the plant in FlexSim that mapped production and transport flows while respecting real spatial constraints, letting alternative layouts and transport routes be tested virtually before any physical change was made. The push for the project came from PIONIER's largest customer, IKEA, whose supply-chain standards for quality, organisation, ESG and cybersecurity were raising the bar for what suppliers needed to demonstrate. For two strategically important products, the validated redesign shortened internal transport routes by over 200 metres and nearly 350 metres respectively, translating into fewer forklift hours, lower energy use and improved material flow between workstations, while giving the company a concrete data-driven basis for further transformation steps rather than a one-off fix. The case illustrates a broader point for manufacturing SMEs: simulation and digital modelling tools once associated mainly with large manufacturers are reachable through free, EU-funded EDIH support, provided the company treats the resulting model as a starting point for continuous improvement rather than a single deliverable.

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