What sent Frito-Lay down this path was a need to
boost productivity. The traditional labor-intensive
process was becoming less and less appealing as volume ramped up—the company ships out 700 million cases each year. On top of that, the process
required a lot of bending and reaching on the workers’ part. So the company was eager to find an alternative, explains Andy Fisher, senior director of
warehouse operations for Frito-Lay North America
(US and Canada).
In 1995, the company approached integrator
Wynright about automating the process. Fisher says
Wynright was a natural place to turn for help. The
two had worked together on a number of DC racking and conveyor projects since 1982, and over the
years, the provider had offered many useful suggestions for improving Frito-Lay’s operations. “They
really knew our business and understood our [dis-tribution centers’] wants and needs,” he says.
The team of engineers and project managers
assigned to the task kicked off the project by going
straight to the source, observing workers as they
built stacks by gently tossing cases on top of one
another. After watching the workers load trucks,
they then tried it themselves. Deepak Aurora, a 30-
year veteran of Frito-Lay (now retired) who served
as a technical liaison to Wynright, recalls, “We said
to the operators, ‘All right, you step aside, and we
will load the truck, so that we [can] get a feeling for
how difficult it is and what all the steps are.’”
Once it had a handle on the process, the team
took up the question of how to replicate that gentle
tossing action with technology, Fisher says. It deter-
mined that this could be accomplished by having
the cases shoot off the end of a conveyor. To create
the stack, workers would simply change the angle of
the conveyor so that the cases would land in the
right place, according to Aurora.
FROM DINOSAURS TO ROBOTS
While it was Frito-Lay that came to Wynright with
the general concept for a loading system in 1995, 10
years later it was the other way around. This time,
Wynright approached Frito-Lay with an idea for an
upgrade. Wynright’s idea was to take the worker out
of the process and instead, use a mobile robot that
would move into the trailer, build the load, and
