If you are planning a new corrugated plant for the 2026–2030 horizon, there is one signal from the market that should not be ignored.
It was articulated very clearly by Alfio Brandi, the new Business Development Director of Emmepi Group, when the company officially presented its Vertical Warehouse strategy. What Brandi outlined was not a product launch, but a shift in how future corrugated factories should be designed, structured, and scaled.
When Alessandro Bersanetti took the stage in Rome at the FEFCO-25 Technical Seminar, he was not presenting a concept or a promise of the future. The vertical warehouse shown there had already been operating for several years on a real industrial site next to Emmepi Group’s own facilities and had been further refined on a friendly corrugated plant. This was a solution shaped by real production constraints, real bottlenecks, and real operational pressure, not by presentations or renderings.
The real turning point came when Emmepi and Warak Consulting s.l.u. recognized that the next stage of development required a complementary set of competences. This realization marked the beginning of a strategic partnership between the two companies, bringing together Emmepi’s expertise in mechanical systems and automated material handling with Warak’s specialization in logistics software and factory optimization.
Founded in 2000, Warak Consulting s.l.u. contributes a dedicated software and engineering layer focused on control logic, algorithms, and system intelligence. Within this partnership, Emmepi remains fully responsible for the supply and integration of the vertical warehouse systems, while Warak enhances their operation through software-driven decision-making, dynamic location management, operator-free logic, and full traceability.
Together, this collaboration transforms Emmepi’s vertical warehouses from mechanically automated systems into software-guided logistics solutions — without altering delivery responsibility, but significantly expanding system capabilities.
What is especially revealing is how Warak itself describes this collaboration.
Joaquim Vilà i Capdevila, owner and CEO of Warak Consulting s.l.u., speaks about the partnership not as a business deal, but as an engineering convergence the company had been moving toward for years:
“After more than twenty-five years of engineering work in logistics and vertical storage, we can honestly say that we are ready like never before. With Emmepi Group, we found exactly what we had been looking for to bring our solutions into the corrugated industry. And we truly hope that we are also what Emmepi was looking for. From the very beginning, we spoke the same language. That kind of mutual understanding, when you grasp each other’s ideas almost halfway through a sentence, is rare and deeply satisfying. We see a unique project here, a collaboration that today has no real alternative and already gives our customers a significant advantage.”
This statement explains much of what is happening beneath the surface. Warak brings the intelligence, the software architecture, and the zero-operator philosophy, while Emmepi brings industrial credibility, hardware, integration capability, service infrastructure, and responsibility toward the customer. These two companies did not simply decide to collaborate; they were approaching the same problem from different directions and eventually met at the right point.
The moment this cooperation was formally presented as the sixth division of Emmepi Group — Vertical Warehouse — marked a clear transition.
What had existed for years as working engineering solutions without a defined commercial identity finally became a structured, market-facing system. The presence of Alfio Brandi at this moment was not accidental. His more than twenty years experience in the corrugated industry gave him a front-row view of how industrial value is built over decades, how technology portfolios mature, and how companies evolve from equipment suppliers into system players with global valuation weight.
What Brandi effectively communicated is that vertical warehousing is no longer an accessory. It is becoming structural. In the next generation of corrugated plants, storage will not be a passive area consuming square meters, but an active production node governed by software, integrated with ERP and MES systems, balancing flows between corrugator and converting, reducing forklift traffic, improving safety, and absorbing production variability without human intervention.
For anyone designing a plant for 2026–2030, this fundamentally changes where planning begins. The discussion is no longer limited to corrugator speed or converting capacity. It now includes how vertical space is used, how WIP is buffered, how material flows are orchestrated by software, how operator-free logistics reduces dependency on labor, how traceability is ensured without complexity, and how land, energy, and safety constraints are addressed simultaneously. These ideas are not futuristic concepts — they are already being implemented.
What Emmepi Group has done with its Vertical Warehouse division is to formalize this reality and send a clear signal to the market. If you are planning a new corrugated plant today, ignoring vertical warehousing is no longer a neutral decision. It is a strategic choice with long-term consequences that will be embedded in concrete, steel, and layout for decades.
At corruga.expert, we see this not as a trend, but as a directional shift. Plants that start thinking vertically today will be structurally different tomorrow, and that difference will not be easy — or inexpensive — to recreate once the factory is already running.
The Payback Question: Beyond Square Meters
Of course, the most frequent question from plant owners, CFOs, and project managers remains the same: what is the real payback, and how does it justify the investment? Vertical warehousing is not justified by footprint savings alone, although in regions with high land and construction costs, reducing building area by 40–70% can already cover a significant portion of capex.
The real value lies in the entire operational chain: faster and more predictable WIP flow, dramatically reduced forklift traffic and labor dependency, shorter internal lead times that improve customer service, lower energy consumption, fewer errors and rework, improved safety, and full traceability without manual labeling, all of which increasingly align with ESG requirements.
Industry benchmarks for fully automated vertical storage systems in corrugated board production, including software-driven dynamic allocation and ERP/MES integration, typically show payback periods of 24–48 months, with strong cases reaching ROI in 18–36 months. After payback, annual returns often exceed 25–35%, driven by compounding operational savings rather than single cost reductions.
These numbers are not generic promises. They depend on your specific profile: production volume, order complexity, existing bottlenecks, labor availability, energy costs, and land prices. What works for a large greenfield project in Europe may look different for a brownfield upgrade in Latin America.
The only reliable way to answer the question “how fast will this pay back for my plant?” is to run the numbers using your real data. That conversation should happen before any 2026–2030 layout is finalized.
corruga.expert
