KEEPING THE JUICES FLOWING
Production in the facility takes place seven days a week on
six carton lines, a glass bottle line, a standard plastic-bottle
PET line, and the new aseptic PET line. The new line alone
is designed to produce up to 25,000 containers an hour.
Overall, the facility manufactures about 400 different SKUs,
defined by various juice blends, packaging types, sizes, and
so forth.
Finished products coming from the bottling machines
are shrink-wrapped into six-packs or 24-bottle trays and
then palletized onto either full-sized pallets or half-sized
Euro pallets. Once the packaging and palletizing is completed, control is handed over to the facility’s new warehouse management system (WMS), also supplied by
Krones as part of the upgrade.
The WMS controls the inventory in the automated warehouse as well as the former floor-stored space that’s now
used for overflow and bulk storage. In addition to processing the company’s own branded juices, the new warehouse
management system helped make it possible for
Argozumos to expand its production of private-label juice
products for Europe’s major food retailers and perform co-packing within its facility. The new automated warehouse
has the capacity to easily handle the storage needs for these
other operations as well.
From production, the palletized loads are conveyed to
vertical lifts that raise the loads about 15 feet above floor
level, where they are transferred to conveyors. (Designing
these conveyors to run overhead allows for greater flexibility in the use of the valuable floor space below, such as
reconfiguring or adding new production lines in the
future.) The pallets are then conveyed to the adjacent rack-supported building. The automated system is designed to
handle 146 pallets an hour from production, plus as many
as 60 pallets per day that come in from other facilities.
These outside products will be co-packed with juices produced in Lekunberri.
As pallets arrive in the high-bay area, a contour and pallet inspector automatically checks them to make sure
they’re suitable for use in the AS/RS, with no hanging edges
or broken parts. Rejected pallets are diverted to a spur for
repair. The five cranes of the AS/RS then gather suitable
loads for transport to the double-deep storage locations.
Eighty percent of the loads are on half-pallets slaved together for storage. The warehouse provides enough of a storage
buffer for a two-week turn in products. With the automation, however, a goal is to eventually provide more just-in-time distribution of products, so that dwell time will be
reduced.
When needed for orders, a full pallet or half pallet is
AS/RS materialhandlingupdate
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