ers on forklifts, who ferry the pallets
to rack storage. Other workers break
the pallets down into cases and later,
assemble them into mixed pallet
loads for delivery to individual grocery stores.
By and large, this work has been
accomplished with little more than
forklift trucks and pallet jacks. “The
plain old forklift gets the job done
quicker and for a lot less money,”
says Steven W. Simonson, a partner
at the Raleigh, N.C.-based consulting firm Tompkins Associates.
Furthermore, up until fairly
recently, systems that could handle
complex grocery operations—with their
thousands of stock-keeping units and
diverse array of carton sizes—weren’t
widely available. For the most part, when
grocers deployed technology in their DCs,
it was in the form of voice or labor management systems—technology designed
to help associates work more efficiently,
not to replace them.
But technological advances have altered
the equation, leading a few of the big players to start replacing at least some of those
workers with machines. “We’re seeing a
real interest in automation in the grocery
industry,” says Mike Kotecki, a senior vice
president with systems integrator HK
Systems of Milwaukee, Wis.
In the past five years, HK has automated about 14 grocery warehouses in the
United States, Kotecki reports. One of the
first was a 2004 project at Stop & Shop’s
distribution center in Freetown, Mass.,
where HK installed automated storage
and retrieval systems (AS/RS) that can
accommodate both pallet and case picking. The system HK designed features
cranes that automatically deposit pallets
delivered by forklift into storage and then,
when the pallets are needed for orders,
remove them from storage and shuttle the
loads to a station for loading into outbound trailers. For mixed-case pallets, the
crane lowers pallets to floor-level bins,
where order pickers select the needed
items.
HK has also designed an automated
mixed-case picking solution featuring a
dynamic pick module for a grocery customer that Kotecki declined to name. At
that customer’s facility, workers break
inbound pallets down into cases, which
they deposit into totes or trays for storage
by the unit’s crane. When items are needed for orders, the crane ferries the trays to
pick locations on the sides of the rack.
Workers then retrieve the items for
assembly into mixed pallet loads.
Case by case
Like HK, systems integrator Witron
Integrated Logistics Corp. of Arlington
Heights, Ill., has recently seen a flurry of
interest in automation among grocery
retailers. Within the last five years, Witron
has installed its Order Picking Machinery
