Special
Delivery
repair shops as well as work areas where components are broken down into parts that can be resold.
Moving into larger quarters allowed Radwell to
house more inventory. The company generally takes
in about five times more parts than it sells in order
to maintain a wide assortment of stock. (The distributor holds a lot of inventory because manufacturing
machines—which are durable goods with long useful lives—need parts long after the original manufacturer has stopped providing replacements.)
At the same time, the
move allowed Radwell
to design a facility with
better material flow
than it had in its other
buildings.
The centerpiece of
the operation is the
AutoStore, which
Radwell chose for its
storage density and
ability to handle small parts effectively. The system’s
relatively small footprint also made it a good fit
for the facility’s space, especially since the ceiling’s
30-foot clearance ruled out the use of crane-based
systems.
The AutoStore houses parts in dense stacks of 16
bins that are arranged in a grid. There are nearly
50,000 bins in total, all containing a mix of small
parts. Thirty-four small robots glide on aluminum
rails above the stacks of bins. Each robot is equipped
with a grabbing device that enables it to pick up
the bin on the top of a stack, which it then moves
to a different stack to reorganize the warehouse or
delivers to a picking station to supply a part needed
for an order.
The robots only require a deep charge of four
hours each day. In addition, when they’re not needed for a few minutes, they move over to charging
stations to regenerate throughout the day.
Managers appreciate that the new storage system
has few moving parts, which minimizes downtime.
“The robots aren’t dependent on each other,” says
Todd Radwell. “If a robot goes down, you just take
it and repair it. It doesn’t stop the other robots from
working.”
Another key advantage of the AutoStore is its scal-
ability. Expanding the system will be a simple matter
of adding more grid, stacks, robots, and processing
stations. Currently, the facility has nine stations.
Most of the time, five of the stations are used for
putaway, while four are dedicated to picking, but
they can be easily reassigned as needs change.
PARCELING PARTS
Product flow through the Willingboro building
varies according to the type of part and the business unit it’s associated with. Radwell’s business
is split evenly among
its three revenue-gen-erating operations, with
the sale of new parts
accounting for about
35 percent of its business, used parts another
35 percent, and repairs
approximately 30 percent. Parts for all operations are received at
three doors, with most
arriving in cartons and
the remainder (mainly larger units) on pallets.
Handling inventory here is a bit different than it
is at most parts suppliers, where parts are customarily stored according to SKU. Because Radwell
handles such an enormous variety of parts, it would
be nearly impossible to assign each SKU to its own
bin. Instead, Radwell mixes the parts into bins that
may contain dozens of different SKUs. The parts are
effectively stored by when they are received or made
available for sale.
To track such a seeming hodge-podge of parts, the
company relies on its Epicor Prophet 21 warehouse
management system (WMS) working in conjunction with the Swisslog “SyncQ” software that manages material flow in the automated storage system.
To facilitate product movement, Radwell repurposed more than two miles of conveyors and diverters to transport bins between various parts of the
building, including receiving, production, AutoStore
induction, and product boxing.
Parts for which the company has received advance
ship notices or other documentation are placed on a
conveyor and sent to one of 22 processing stations.
A separate set of 40 processing stations handle bulky
receipts and what are known as “blind receipts.”
These are items sent to the company without notice
by customers hoping to sell off any parts from old
equipment that may still hold value. Workers iden-
