ing transportation costs. In addition to the Bad Vilbel facility, Hassia was operating a second warehouse and production facility about 12 miles away in Rosbach, where it has a
spring water source. Because neither warehouse was big
enough to accommodate output from both production
plants, the company was constantly shuttling products
from one building to the other—a practice that was growing increasingly expensive.
LIMITED OPTIONS
With the pressure mounting, Hassia had limited options for
addressing its capacity crunch. The company wanted to
remain in its current distribution facility in Bad Vilbel,
which is located just half a block from one of its bottling
sites. Though separate, the two buildings are ingeniously
connected via an underground tunnel that runs beneath an
adjacent apartment building. Inside the tunnel is a 360-foot-
long monorail that carries goods from the bottling plant to
the DC.
While expansion might seem the logical solution, that
wasn’t workable in this case. The facility is surrounded by
other properties, making outward expansion impractical.
Options for expanding upward were pretty limited as well.
Because the facility is located in a residential area, the
height of the building could not exceed 20 meters (about
66 feet).
In short, Hassia’s only alternative was to find a way to
make the most of the space it did have—that is, by creating
denser storage. Knowing the solution would likely involve
automated equipment, Hassia turned to Krones, a
Neutraubling, Germany-based systems designer and integrator that specializes in the unique demands of beverage
and food distribution. Krones had supplied much of the
company’s bottle filling equipment, so Hassia felt confident
in contracting with the company for the new design project.
SYSTEM OVERHAUL
The solution Krones came up with went far beyond just a
retool of the storage area. It also involved a complete
redesign of the facility’s work flow and included a new
high-bay warehouse, a new case-picking area, and software
that runs in tandem with the company’s existing ERP system to coordinate the activity. It also incorporated a new
truck loading area, with docks that would allow trucks to
back in for rear loading. The latter move was a response to
increasing requests from Hassia’s customers to load trucks
from the rear rather than the side, as is more commonly
done in Europe.
Designed to maximize storage density, the high-bay automated warehouse features storage lanes capable of holding
39,000 pallets in a footprint of only 8,600 square meters
(92,500 square feet). The system is eight levels high and
consists of four aisles. But unlike traditional automated
storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), where cranes operate
the entire height of the aisles, the system designed by
Krones stacks four cranes within the eight levels of each
aisle. Each crane serves just two levels and runs the length
of the aisle, for a total of 16 cranes overall. The use of the
additional cranes allows for faster input and retrieval from
the system than could be achieved in a traditional AS/RS.
To minimize disruption to the distribution operation—
several sections of the warehouse had to be demolished to
make way for the high-bay addition—the project was conducted in four phases, beginning in the fall of 2008 and
completed in April 2009. About 80 percent of the product
was diverted temporarily to Rosbach during construction,
while the remaining 20 percent was processed within the
sections of the warehouse that were still intact.
“The [project required] a lot of coordination between
everyone involved, as we could not shut down the warehouse operations completely,” says Marhold.
You’re Asked To Move Mountains…
