Going behind, and underneath, Messe Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf, Germany — The throngs of people who pack Messe Düsseldorf for K 2016 will see the world's largest plastics factory, all set up and making parts.

What most do not see is all the work that goes into organizing the move-in and setup.

Don't take it for granted.

We're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how Messe Düsseldorf employees, many of them long-term veterans, put together major trade shows like K.

Creating any big trade show is a major undertaking. But the K show stands alone. The eight-day spectacle that began Oct. 19 covers 170,000 square meters in 19 halls. More than 3,000 exhibitors, including many with running machinery, all need to build their booths, hook up utilities and then tear it all down again.

The logistics are nothing short of a miracle. And every three years, the story gets told in languages from around the world: K 2013, the last one, drew about 219,000 visitors, 58 percent of them from outside Germany.

It's not unusual at a K to see sharply dressed businesspeople riding the U-Bahn next to an attendee with flowing, brightly colored robes, an executive from a packaging maker maybe, or the minister of plastics from some small country. It's exotic.

Germany is known for efficiency and technology, from on-time trains to its energy-efficient escalators that only operate when someone approaches. German factories are among the most automated in the world.

But setting up a big trade show depends on people. Setting up the K show with thousands of moving parts and last-minute changes, the massive team at Messe Düsseldorf uses lots of cell phones and people on the ground, scheduling trucks, assigning forklifts, keeping everything moving forward as the clock ticks down to Day 1.

Trade shows are fun, but the setup is a lot of work.

Ian Hume, the top man overseeing everything, is a good-humored Brit whose title is director of event technology and logistics. Of course, he speaks good German. But K is like the United Nations of plastics without the simultaneous translation.

“I'm waiting for the universal translator. Or Star Trek,” Hume said, laughing.

“And that's one of the good things about these international shows. You meet a lot of people,” Hume said. “So [the logistics person] will have to talk to the Russian truck driver, and the Polish stand construction company, or the Indian exhibitor. You have to communicate, get your point over. So the communication on the show side, it's not just the visitors and exhibitors. It's all the people that are involved in setting up the fair.”

Messe Düsseldorf, which runs shows all over the world, has tried using its 75 outside cameras to check the truck staging areas near the halls and help its employees schedule deliveries. But officials found it was better to use traffic marshals using special cell phones who are stationed in each area, said Werner Arnold, who handles transportation issues for the event technology and logistics group.

No automated vision method. No directing traffic with GPS.

The key to making thing work is having people, on the ground, using their eyes.

Arnold said a K show brings in 2,700 trucks during the eight peak days of the 13-day setup. That's 300 or 400 trucks a day. About 100 to 150 exhibitors display big machinery, which arrives first. After a short lull, the volume picks up, with cars and smaller vehicles, he said.

Arnold, a 30-year employee, helped develop the in-house software for the trucking guidance system about 15 years ago. He is clear that people, not computers, are in control.

“The computer helps him decide, but the decision is up to him,” Arnold said.

Hume, a 20-year veteran of Messe Düsseldorf, said the hands-on work continues right up until the show begins. He knows many people at exhibitors by name, from years of running setups, and they know him and the other team members.

“Once they're here, it's solving individual problems and talking through technical points. It's a people-intensive business,” Hume said. “It might not be obvious to an exhibitor who comes on the first day and stands on his booth for all the days, what's gone into that before. How labor-intensive and communications-intensive that is.”

Underneath Messe Düsseldorf are tunnels so clean you could eat off the floor. And they run under all 19 halls, like something from a science fiction movie.

You can easily walk through these subterranean tunnels. Each hall has five. Narrower passageways link different show halls. You can actually go underground from Hall 1 to Hall 17 without ever seeing the sky.

Pipes run through the main tunnels, carrying utilities including compressed air, chilled water, wastewater, drinking water and the sprinkler system.

Electrical cabling also runs through the tunnels. Pierre Piccinno, the master electrician, said that at the K show — given the plastics fair's large power consumption level — each hall has four or five electricians, covering about 300 to 400 individual power connections — some 6,000 connections for the entire show.

For all the machinery running at K, Messe Düsseldorf brings in extra cooling through auxiliary chillers set up outside the halls, both for the machinery and to offset the heat in the buildings.

Plastics News visited the giant trade fair campus in late May, during setup for Drupa 2016, the big printing and packaging show. Hume chatted enthusiastically as he climbed over the humming pipes outside one of the halls. He said Messe Düsseldorf designed the additional hall cooling system special for K, and uses it for other major shows that have equipment in motion.

Advanced machinery, turning out parts, is a big draw for K show attendees. Seeing plastic parts whipping out of machines, then expertly handled by automation, is mesmerizing. Hume said the extra effort to support a show like K is worth it.

“That's the big advantage of our shows is you show the machines running, at the speeds, at the volumes, that they do when they buy them. The customers come from all over the world and they see that thing running. That's the amazing thing,” Hume said.

After two decades in the business, he still marvels at how it all comes together.

Piccinno gives a tour of the halls, along with Uwe Wortmann, who also is an electrician and customer manager of logistics and events. Hall 1 is one of the smaller buildings, at just 12,000 square meters, but during Drupa, it had just one exhibitor: Heidelberg, the big German printing equipment company.

Looking up at the ceiling, Wortmann motions to large ball-shaped connection points, called nodes, that are used for hanging exhibitor materials. Wortmann is part of three generations of Messe Düsseldorf employees — his father, now retired, was in charge of stand building and his daughter is an event manager.

The K show is the largest consumer of power, so electricians play a crucial role.

“The electric wire comes from the underground,” Piccinno said. “Then we make the connection and switch it on. It's a lot of work.”

In each booth, the center of the action is the junction box, a humble-looking device that is built by the trade show company's electrical department. Each exhibitor provides a detailed booth plan, and orders a specific number of plugs, and the electricians install them on the side of the box. Different amp levels are available, and electricians install the appropriate fuses. There is another fuse at each booth's connection point in the underground tunnel.

If a fuse blows it impacts just that booth, not the entire hall.

Like the other setup crews, the electricians are busy well in advance of each show.

“Before the first exhibitor comes into the hall, we set this up, the junction boxes. There can be hundreds of junction boxes at each hall,” Piccinno said.

Once the box is wired, electricians descend to the underground tunnel to link the cable to the connection point down below. The cable feeds up through the floor, just like wiring in your house — if you changed the wiring many times a year, over and over and over.

Still, Piccinno and Wortmann say standardization of the equipment and the process make life much easier at Messe Düsseldorf. “It's a very simple system,” Piccinno said.

All exhibitors get a final bill for electricity usage. It's part of Messe Düsseldorf's billing and accounting system. The show management also measures waste they have to haul away, including both booth construction debris and any plastic parts or scrap.

Messe Düsseldorf will ship as much of the waste it collects as possible to recyclers.

“But that's separate from the [trade fair] participating price, because not everybody produces. So if you consume electricity or produce waste, that's what our policy is, you will pay for what you consume,” Hume said.

But Messe Düsseldorf does not charge for disposing hazardous waste. Special stations outside the halls are available for dumping paint and other contaminated waste, and washing out buckets and paint brushes.

Hume explained that charging for that service could encourage exhibitors to dump them down the drain.

“We charge if you produce waste, but hazardous waste we take free. So they don't just throw it away,” he said.

Werner Arnold sits inside the logistics office, where the cameras continually show the parking situation around the halls and major roadways.

Trucks come into the trade fair grounds on the motorway, and drivers park in a holding lot and go over to a checkpoint, a small but functional building with six logistics employees.

“And here we check what they have for a load, where they want to go to. What material it is. For which exhibitor it is,” Arnold said.

The scene was fairly laid back during the visit before Drupa. But it can get hectic. Each driver gets a bar-coded entry permit valid for a specific amount of time, just for loading and unloading. The vehicle must be removed right afterward.

Messe Düsseldorf hires dozens of traffic marshals for each fair.

“It's always the same [people], year after year. But they are not full-time employees,” Arnold said.

They monitor when space frees up, and contact the appropriate trucks.

“They've got a device, like a professional cell phone. And the truck driver leaves his number of his cell phone here. And the marshals see in this device who is waiting,” by checking the screen, he said.

All the marshal has to do is put an X on the screen, and the system instantly sends a text message to the truck driver in the holding area.

Because documents get scanned at several locations during move-in and tear-down, Arnold is able to track each truck's history — exactly what time the driver leaves the parking lot and enters the grounds, and finally, when the truck departs.

Is that level of detail necessary? “Sometimes. If the exhibitor is looking for his truck, for example,” Arnold said. He motioned to a computer screen. “And what I see here is the truck comes from Germany, it's a German registration number.”

Automated, it is not.

“There are so many different trucks coming from so many different countries. And there's no standard for it. The only standard we can use is a cell phone — and we use it, to send this SMS [text messages],” Arnold said.

Once trucks are in place, Messe Düsseldorf's logistics partners spring into action — DB Schenker and Kühne + Nagel. The exhibitor chooses one or the other to move freight into, and out of, the exhibit halls.

“We don't let any other people to use lifting equipment, forklifts or cranes,” Hume said.

Crews use hand-held devices that are linked into the Messe Düsseldorf system, so they know if a company needs, say, a forklift at 9 a.m. at Hall 5.

For Drupa, the two forwarding companies used about 150 forklifts and around 10 truck cranes. Employees know how to communicate with truck drivers from every country — Turkey, Romania, Lithuania, Russia.

They work out of small buildings outside of the halls. Asked how many languages he speaks, one Schenker guy laughed and said: “Not perfect, but English. A little bit Italy. A little bit Spain. A little bit Turkey. A little bit all.”

They speak the language of moving stuff.

Messe Düsseldorf has its own fire brigade with four full-time firefighters and 27 volunteers who work in shifts. The department has emergency and firefighting vehicles, and they can assist on any alarm, check the system, do emergency first aid or even evacuate the halls, until the Düsseldorf firefighters arrive.

“The site here is very special,” Hume said. “We used to have the fire brigade here during the show and one or two days before the shows. Now we've got them here on a permanent basis. Even if there's no show.”

The Messe even has a 24/7 manned safety and security center, as well as medical centers and doctors.

“If you think about the K show, you've got 70,000 people on site on a maximum day. It's a small town,” Hume said.

“And you've got people from 52 nations here at the K. These things we have to think about the whole time, as well. We've got the whole world here.”