Flexible e-Commerce Fulfillment
“Clients rely on Dotcom Distribution to deliver a
tailored brand experience to e-commerce
customers. Lucas helps us meet that challenge
by picking more items in a shorter period of
time, with fewer errors and more flexibility. This
allows us to handle our clients’ order surges
during peak periods with less incremental labor
while retaining our accuracy and efficiency.”
uct as it travels through the supply chain.
Morikubo says that in Japan, only blood
products and other biological products
are currently required by law to have full
traceability, but the company anticipates
that other pharmaceutical products will
soon be subject to similar legislation. “We
are looking ahead to prepare for laws for
greater trace requirements,” he says.
The combination of automation and
sophisticated software enables TBC
Saitama to process 90,000 order lines
daily in just under 34,000 square meters
(approximately 365,200 square feet) of
space. Considering the amount of picking
and packing required for pharmaceuticals, you would expect to see a much larger facility. But the high degree of automation allows for a smaller DC than might
otherwise be required. The facility was
also constructed with three stories, which
reduces the overall building footprint in a
country where land is expensive.
TBC Saitama handles 28,000 different stock-keeping units (SKUs). Products
come to the facility from a wide variety
of manufacturers, and most are delivered
on plastic pooled pallets or on wheeled
trolleys. About 15 percent of the 15,000
cartons received daily do not have a bar
code, so Toho installed an optical charac-ter-recognition system that automatically
takes a picture of each uncoded carton,
and then reads the manufacturer’s original label or carton markings, including
product lot and expiration date. The recognition system can process 1,000 cases
an hour.
Some inbound pallets of higher-de-mand products are conveyed to an automated storage and retrieval system that
dynamically stores pallets in 2,310 positions. The system has five aisles, with a
crane operating in each aisle. Each aisle is
33 pallet-storage positions long and seven
positions high. The pallets stored in this
AS/RS also help to restock a miniload unit
that stores cartons and totes. The cartons
are depalletized by two robots.
The miniload has 18 aisles, with a crane
operating in each and a capacity of 53,136
storage locations. The cranes can move
2,700 cases an hour. The cases are auto-
matically measured using lasers and are
also weighed before entering. Knowing
the correct dimensions allows the
system to store large, medium, and
small cases side by side within one
location in the miniload, thereby
better utilizing space. Dimensioning
information is captured for all new
products and is used by the robotic
picking stations downstream.
Some of the lower-demand products arrive with more than one SKU
in the carton. These must be repacked
manually into totes, scanned, and
conveyed to the fixed rack. Products
also have to be repacked into totes
for the robotic picking stations positioned downstream. However, the
