BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR
AUTOMATED STORAGE
specialreport
EVERY CARPENTER KNOWS THAT THE WORK ISN’T
done until the finishing touches have been added. For
25,000 carpenters and cabinetmakers throughout Europe,
that often includes adding edgings along with knobs, handles, hooks, and other hardware from Rudolph Ostermann
GmbH.
What are edgings? They’re the finishing strips that go on
the end of a cabinet or countertop. Once a carpenter cuts a
piece of material to size, there remains a rough unfinished
edge. An edging piece is then glued on to provide a professional finish. Ostermann is the largest supplier of edgings
in Europe, and edging accounts for 70 percent of its annual
sales.
Ostermann distributes these products from a facility located in Bocholt, in the northern Rhine region of
Germany near the border with the Netherlands. The
11,000-square-meter (118,403-square-foot) facility handles
around 3,000 orders daily, consisting of about 5,000 order
lines. The distribution center also ships to carpenters, furniture stores, and office supply stores throughout Europe
and to select customers in other countries, including the
United States. Orders received by 4 p.m. ship the same day,
with next-day delivery throughout Germany and nearby
nations.
In order to keep up with demand and improve its
product handling, the family-owned company erected a
high-bay building outfitted with an automated storage and
retrieval system (AS/RS) in 2012. The facility was designed
by SSI Schaefer, which also served as the systems integrator.
The project included the material flow design, construction
of a rack-supported high-bay building, installation of the
automated storage system and connecting conveyors, and
seamless integration with the warehouse management system. The automated system now helps Ostermann organize
its stock and keep pace with growth.
“We considered just building a warehouse with racks in
it, but we realized that it would be slow to process orders,”
says Christof Wauters, logistics and material manager for
Ostermann. “A manual warehouse would have reduced the
performance of the picker. That is why we chose automation. The system also takes up less space in the building and
reduces errors,” he says.
The AS/RS is used to house products that replenish
picking areas. Hardware and other decorative products are
stored in the automated system, along with 1,500 different
edging products (the edgings come in wood tones and just
about every color of the rainbow, as well as in a variety of
widths). The variety results in more than 7,000 different
SKUs (stock-keeping units).
Suppliers deliver the edgings in large rolls that lie flat
on pallets. These pallets are placed onto conveyors that
feed the AS/RS. The system offers 10,000 storage locations
for pallets arrayed along its two aisles, both of which are
120 meters (394 feet) long. Each aisle has a crane to pick
up pallets for storage and retrieve them when needed for
replenishment. The rack measures 24 meters ( 78 feet) high,
and the system provides some 45,000 cubic meters (more
than 1. 5 million cubic feet) of automated storage space.
At the time the automated system was installed,
Ostermann was already using an SAP warehouse manage-
ment system to direct distribution operations. Once the
high-bay warehouse was built, the company added the SAP
Germany’s Ostermann relies on a
sophisticated automated storage and
retrieval system to process orders for its
carpentry products.
edge The leading edge
