of 85 to 125 pallets per hour. The design
had to ensure that whatever material handling system was selected would have
access to most of the perishable inventory
at all times, even if part of the system went
down.
GO HIGH AND DEEP
The ultimate solution was to construct a
35,000-square-foot rack-supported building with 90-foot interior clearance and
installation of a large-scale deep-lane
AS/RS that could handle 7,000 pallets.
“The idea of a smaller footprint and a
taller building drove much of the project,”
Sobol says.
After its analysis, Peach State proposed
installing an AS/RS designed by Dambach
Lagersysteme, a German manufacturer of
material handling systems. Dannon executives and managers visited several
Dambach installations in Europe, including one dairy company that had a deep-lane system similar to the one proposed.
Sobol says those visits gave Dannon executives confidence in the proposal.
Prior to launching the system, Peach
State and Dannon put it through its paces
in a simulation developed by Design Rate
Simulations, a Salt Lake City simulation
specialist. That gave them great confi-
dence that the system would meet or
exceed expectations. “We were pleased to
see that it blew the project rates out the
window,” Sobol says. “The retrieval and
putaway rates were way beyond the rates
we expected.”
The system employs three cranes: two
storage and retrieval cranes with two
shuttles each and a smaller crane used for
shipping. It is capable of handling 120
pallets per hour. Perhaps one of the most
important aspects of the design is that
either of the storage and retrieval cranes
can reach most of the inventory even if
one of the cranes is out of operation—
critically important for Dannon’s perish-
able goods. “It gives us a huge amount of
flexibility in case something does happen
since our products have a very short shelf
life,” Anderson says. “Product sits here a
maximum of three days.”
Either crane can reach as much as 80
percent of the pallet positions. Anderson
explains that the racks are 11 positions
deep. In normal operation, one
crane handles six positions and the
other, five. But because the racks are
in a single channel, either crane can
reach up to 10 positions deep, pro-
viding access to nearly all of the pal-
lets. “The only reason we didn’t go to
11 is that we don’t want to risk the
shuttle driving out of the rack,”
Anderson says.
Sobol adds that allowing access
from both sides also offered storage
flexibility for Dannon. It enables
Dannon to vary the number of
products from a single lot in any one
lane. For example, one side could be
