DC Velocity - October 2013

ma te ri a l h an d l i n g up d at e

A S/ R S

60 DC VELOCITY OCTOBER 2013 www.dcvelocity.com eight pallets deep with one product, while the other could hold two pallets of a different product.

The AS/RS system itself is 31 pallet positions deep and 10 positions high. The shuttles that lift the pallets for storage or retrieval operate separately from the cranes. Shuttles glide under the pallets, lift them and carry them into the assigned storage position, and set them on rails within the racks or, for shipping, lift them from the racks and bring them to the cranes. “That leaves the cranes independent,” Anderson says.

MAKE, COOL, STORE, RETRIEVE

The process starts back at the end of the manufacturing line. Production runs of between 20 and 50 pallets of a particular item move from the production lines to the warehouse, carried by Dematic automated guided vehicles (AGVs). Before going to storage, the yogurt must go through a cooling process: It comes off the production line at about 60 degrees F and must be cooled to between 36 and 45 degrees F. The AGVs drop the pallets into cooling cells, each of which holds a single pallet, or a cooling tunnel, through which up to 45 pallets move via conveyor. After the cooling process, the AGVs move the pallets to a conveyor for induction into the AS/RS.

To track the pallets as they move from production to the
AS/RS, Dannon employs SAP’s enterprise resource plan-
ning system as well as its own warehouse management
system (WMS), called Tek Dan. Developed by the compa-
ny’s French parent, Danone, Tek Dan captures production
data from the SAP system and then links the RFID-
enabled pallets with the lot code and time from produc-
tion. As the pallets move into storage, the facility’s ware-
house control system (WCS) reads their RFID tags,
matching them with the lot code and number of cases
retrieved from the WMS. The WCS was developed for
Dannon and Peach State by Georgia-based engineering
services and systems development firm Atronix
Engineering.

After reading the pallet tag, the WCS produces a print-and-apply label, a pallet license plate with product information embedded in a bar code. In the meantime, the pallets go through one of the two stretch wrap machines before induction into the AS/RS racks. The pallets then move through a sizing station that ensures each pallet is square.

Having the WCS capture lot data on every pallet is crucial to the efficient operation of the AS/RS because the WMS cannot see specific locations in the automated system. “It knows that it has X number of pallets of this material at this quantity, but it doesn’t know a given pallet’s position,”