52 DC VELOCITY MARCH 2014 www.dcvelocity.com
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WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE
Today, the process unfolds with well-tuned precision.
Incoming shipments are delivered by truck to a transportation hall located on the DC’s ground level. Beverage trucks
pull into the building for unloading at eight positions,
opening their side doors to give lift trucks access to their
contents. The truck drivers carry PDAs (personal digital
assistants), which they use to transfer data on their inbound
loads to the facility’s enterprise resource planning (ERP)
system upon arrival.
Adjacent to the open transportation
hall is a two-level transport system featuring rail-guided shuttles. The shuttles
serve both incoming and outgoing products. Received goods are handled on the
lower shuttle, while goods that are ready
for loading onto trucks flow out from
the upper shuttle system, which operates
above receiving and about 10 feet from floor level. The
open design allows lift trucks to access the input and output
stations of both shuttles from the main floor.
Lift trucks are dispatched to collect pallets from the delivery trucks and ferry them the short distance to the receiving
stations of the shuttle. Upon arrival, the lift trucks simply
place their loads on the shuttle input positions. A shuttle
car then takes the pallet and transfers it to conveyors for
transport to the high-bay storage area.
While plastic single-use bottles are becoming more popular in Germany, most beverages are still packaged in reusable glass bottles. These empties, returned from stores and
wholesale customers, are unloaded from delivery trucks
and transferred to the lower-level shuttle. From there, the
empty bottles are raised with a vertical lift and then diverted to an overhead bridge, where they’re deposited on a
conveyor that whisks them to the adjacent bottling plant.
Once the empty-bottle pallets arrive at the production
side of the bridge, a lift automatically lowers them to the
first-floor level. From there, one of the facility’s eight automated guided vehicles (AGVs) gathers the pallets, four at a
time, from the lifts and carries them to temporary storage
or bottling operations, as needed. The empty bottles are
eventually washed and refilled.
Bottling takes place on three lines using local spring
water. Two lines handle glass bottles, while the third fills
plastic bottles. The bottles are placed into beverage crates,
which are then stacked onto pallets, typically 36 crates per
pallet. The same AGVs that handle the empty returned
bottles also move the filled crates. The pallet loads are taken
to a vertical lift, which raises them to the overhead bridge.
A conveyor in the bridge, flowing in the opposite direction
from the returned bottles, transports them to other conveyors that move them to the high-bay input stations.
WATER TOWER
Local zoning regulations in Schierling restrict the height
of Labertaler’s high-bay warehouse to 28 meters (about 92
feet). As a result, Labertaler opted for deep-lane automated
storage to maximize capacity in a small footprint. Pallets
here are packed densely into long channels.
Approximately 400 SKUs find a home in 15,000 high-
bay positions that are redundantly spread over 11 levels.
Incoming pallets are transferred upon arrival to one of
two vertical lifts that move them to their assigned levels.
Typically, one lift is used for inbound pallets and the other
for outbound, but each lift can serve both
functions.
From the lift, each pallet is moved to a
transfer car that runs down the middle of
each level, perpendicular to the 72 channel
lanes. The warehouse management system
The shuttle glides under the pallet and lifts it for transport down the lane. It then ferries its load to the assigned
position, measuring the distance within the lane by the
length of the extended shuttle cable in combination with
lasers. Normally, only one SKU from one production batch
is assigned per lane. This arrangement assures that all SKUs
are accessible at any time and that there is flexibility to process items on a first-in/first-out basis. Most products stay in
the high bay only a few days. All told, the system can handle
310 inbound pallets per hour.
ABOVE AND BELOW
The deep-lane storage system at Labertaler is designed with
an access deck near the racking’s vertical midpoint. Visitors
to the facility are treated to a special-effects show thanks
to some creative lighting here. Levels above the deck are
bathed in blue light, while those below are washed in red.
Labertaler calls it “heaven and hell,” and the effect, especially looking down into the depths, is striking.
New products continually move in, while products needed for orders or to replenish the crate picking areas are
gathered with the same shuttles for output. The shuttles
slide under the loads, lift them up to clear the rails, and
return them to the transfer cars. The transfer cars next
reload the pallets onto a lift for placement onto an outbound lane. The system can discharge 360 pallets per hour
at peak.
Products that will ship as full pallets are conveyed to the
dispatch shipping area located in the transportation hall. A
shuttle car picks up each load and delivers it to an assigned
staging lane. Lift trucks gather the loads and place them
onto the appropriate beverage trucks.
