BY DAVID MALONEY, SENIOR EDITOR
ORDER PICKING AND FULFILLMENT
THE ROLLING HILLS OF LOWER BAVARIA ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR NATural springs. Nestled in a valley near the town of Schierling is Labertaler, one of
Germany’s leading producers of natural spring waters and other beverages.
In the U.S., a handful of brands dominate the bottled water market, but
it’s a different story in Germany. German bottlers face stiff competition,
with a wide variety of waters vying for the consumer’s dollar. These
include mineral water, plain (non-carbonated) water, high vitality
water, and flavored waters. And the variety of offerings continues to
grow, which means companies like Labertaler must contend with a constantly expanding stock-keeping unit (SKU) base.
Family-owned Labertaler has been a regional bottler in Bavaria since
1949, when it delivered homemade lemonade by handcart. Times have
changed, and Labertaler has long since replaced the handcart
with modern technology in an effort to improve customer
service, process higher volumes, and accommodate 320
different beverage products. Labertaler now boasts
a highly automated DC adjacent to its Schierling
bottling plant from which it distributes water, juice,
and soft drinks produced at the plant as well as both
alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages supplied by
other manufacturers. Many of these products are
sold through its 150 company-owned beverage stores,
Krones, a German material handling company that specializes in beverages, provided most of the bottling and handling
equipment in the production plant, so it was only natural that
Labertaler would turn to Krones to design and implement its
warehouse systems. The material handling solution Krones
engineered includes automated guided vehicles, high-density
automated storage, transfer shuttle cars, and plenty of pallet
conveyors to link them all together.
With hundreds of different beverage products flowing in daily,
German bottler Labertaler was having a hard time keeping its
head above water. Automated DC systems changed all that.
Flows like,
well, water!
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