Anderson says. “That’s embedded in the WCS. The system
will call for a specific pallet, but the WCS is designed to say,
‘OK, you requested this pallet with this material and this
code date and quantity, but we’ll give you another pallet
instead.’ It gets the same material, but it might not be the
specific pallet requested.”s
He explains that the Tek Dan system keeps close track of
the time of production. So it may call for the first pallet
produced in a run ahead of any others. But that first pallet
into the AS/RS is likely to be deep in the rack. “We didn’t
want to have a system that would have to shuffle four or
five pallets,” he says. “Those are all wasted moves. If that
pallet in front is exactly the same, I’m going to give it that
instead.”
The WCS also offers another redundancy important to
Dannon, Sobol says. Should the Tek Dan system be down
for any reason, the WCS can still keep the system running.
“They can reconcile information after the fact,” Sobol says.
“The WCS acts much like a WMS.”
Eighty-five percent of the shipments from the warehouse
go by truckload carrier to Dannon DCs around the coun-
try, mostly to a DC in Salt Lake City, but also to facilities in
Allentown, Pa.; Dayton, Ohio; and Fort Worth, Texas. The
other 15 percent moves directly to end customers’ DCs. The
shipments are all managed from Dannon’s U.S. headquar-
ters in White Plains, N. Y.
The system feeds pallets to the shipping crane in the correct sequence for trailer loading. “It can queue those up in
advance of the truck’s arrival at the dock,” says Sobol. (The
system can configure up to 13 trailer loads in advance.) As
a result, the warehouse can now load a 30-pallet outbound
truck in 20 minutes, Sobol says. In fact, the system can outpace the forklift drivers who load the trailers. The fast shipping rate was one of Dannon’s major goals. The system is
currently able to move two trailer loads an hour out of each
dock. Dannon ships 35 to 45 trailer loads out of the facility
each day.
The system has provided Dannon with substantial cost
savings. “The biggest things are the transportation and storage and handling savings we’ve been able to achieve by
shipping direct,” Anderson says. Another advantage: The
old cooler space can now be used for raw materials, specifically the large stainless steel totes of fruit used in many of
the products. That has saved Dannon much of the cost of
storing goods at a third-party warehouse and the cost of
shipping them daily to the plant.
Ultimately, Anderson expects the new warehouse and
AS/RS will save Dannon $3 million to $4 million a year.
“That will grow as our business grows,” he says. And that
growth is substantial: 20 percent per year, he says. ;
