ADVERTORIAL
PERFORMANCE PROFILE
A DC VELOCITY SPEED CHALLENGE
A clean start
Presented by Retrotech
Procter & Gamble has achieved dense storage and superior
inventory control since it has taken an ACTIV role in distributing
its fabric care products.
AFTER YEARS OF STEADY GROWTH IN ITS HOME FABRIC CARE
business, Procter & Gamble realized it had to do something to consolidate the distribution of these products, which include well-known laundry brands such as Tide, Cheer and Downy. Until
recently, P&G delivered these products from a warehouse adjacent
to its manufacturing facility in Lima, Ohio, as well as six other contracted facilities, one as far away as 100 miles
from the plant. Yet this capacity was still not
enough to handle the growing demands of its
customer base. P&G clearly needed an automated solution that would allow it to efficiently move its mix of pallet-based products
through an increasingly complex supply chain.
That’s when Procter & Gamble chose ACTIV, a
high-density dynamic storage solution from
Retrotech, to be the heart of a new mega distribution facility that opened in Lima in 2007. The 1. 1 million-square-foot facility consolidated all operations under one roof and
is the largest automated facility in North America.
With its 94,000 storage positions, the ACTIV system holds pallets
of laundry products manufactured at the nearby production plant.
These are very high-turn products that are held within the system
for only 7–9 days before being assembled for customer orders.
Procter & Gamble is not alone in its use of ACTIV. Kraft Foods,
Cargill, LiDestri Foods and many other leading producer companies
rely on ACTIV daily to automatically store, buffer, optimize and then
discharge palletized loads in sequence, efficiently and cost-effectively.
“The applications that are suited best for ACTIV are those types
where the anticipated dwell time is relatively short,” explains Pete
Hartman, president of Retrotech. “For a lot of companies, this is a
trend they are pushing towards – reducing inventory while at the
same time increasing volume. ACTIV as a technology is well suited
to high-turn inventory strategies.”
Think of ACTIV as a giant Rubik’s Cube, with dense pallet storage
at every position in its height, width and depth. Besides the ability
to dynamically store products in any location, ACTIV allows easy
movement of products back and forth along deep storage lanes.
There are no aisles between lanes, as are found in many automated storage systems. Instead, pallets ride on carts that are pulled by
cables. The carts slide under the loads and then automatically lift
them for fast transport within the lanes. Since the carts themselves
have no power, they are easy to maintain and extremely durable.
All mechanical and electrical elements are located outside the rack
structure for easy accessibility.
While the carts move pallets within the lanes,
Cross Aisle Transfers inserted at intervals carry
pallets from one lane to any other. Vertical
transfer lifts within ACTIV further allow the pallets to move up and down to higher and lower
lane levels. So in essence, the pallets can be
densely stored, then moved to any other position. This permits a constant reshuffling of
inventory to assure first-in/first-out delivery or
to accommodate any other order fulfillment strategy, such as
sequencing. Highly intuitive software determines the ideal path
that a product should travel within the system.
When pallets are needed for orders, ACTIV stages them in
sequence and then delivers them to discharge stations, where lift
truck operators can easily collect them for direct loading onto
trucks. The system eliminates the need for any further buffering or
staging at facility docks.
The ACTIV system at the P&G Lima facility runs continuously,
24/7 - reshuffling the loads and optimizing them for current and
future demand cycles. Its unique ordering capabilities allow P&G to
build loads for 500 trucks a day, consisting of some 16,000
sequenced pallets.
“One of the coolest things to me is its speed and efficiency,” says
P&G’s Terry Bicknell. “It’s doing what it took literally hundreds of
forklift drivers to do before in a minimal amount of time and with
speed and accuracy we just couldn’t match doing those types of
things manually.”
For more information on Retrotech, call (585) 924-6333 or visit
www.retrotech.com.
To watch a short video showing how Retrotech’s ACTIV storage solution
works at LiDestri Foods and how it can improve your operations, go to
www.dcvelocity.com and click on the Performance Profile Speed Challenge.
