Leading in warehouse automation
your challenge, our solution
Vanderlande is dedicated to improving its customers’ business processes
and competitive position by providing automated material handling
systems and services. We improve our customers’ logistics processes and
increase their logistics performance today, tomorrow and throughout the
entire life cycle.
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The automated system has also
cut picking errors in half, while providing a robust accuracy rate of 99.9
percent. On top of that, Phoenix
Contact has seen productivity
improve by 45 percent.
But those productivity gains hav-
en’t translated into job losses; work-
ers have instead been reassigned to
other functions, Paioletti explains.
“Even with the labor savings, we
have never had a layoff in the history
of our company,” he says. “If we did
not have the automation, however,
we would need a larger footprint and
a lot more people.”
These parts are packed overseas into the
same totes that will be used to house the
products within the AS/RS. The totes
are loaded into ocean and air shipping
containers that are owned by Phoenix
Contact. Middletown receives three or
four ocean containers every week as well
as a daily air shipment. Upon arrival, the
totes are removed and inducted directly
into the AS/RS.
Eliminating the need to repack items
into other storage containers has greatly
simplified the receiving process. “We can
receive a sea container in less than a day
using only [the equivalent of] three and
a half people. Before the automation, it
took seven people two and a half days
to receive the same container,” Paioletti
reports.
As parts are needed for orders, the
warehouse management system (also
supplied by viastore) issues instructions
for the appropriate totes to be delivered
to 10 goods-to-person picking stations.
A computer screen displays which of five
sizes of cartons should be used to pack
the order. It also indicates how many of
each item to select. Some of the totes may
contain as many as four different SKUs,
separated by dividers. To confirm that the
correct part has been selected, the worker
is asked to scan the item’s bar code. In all,
approximately 7,500 picks are made daily.
The selected items are placed into a
shipping carton, and a packing slip, bar-code label, and shipping label are printed
right at the station. The worker completes
the order by applying the labels and sealing the carton.
Once a tote has been emptied, the
container is filled with products manufactured in Middletown for shipment
back to Germany. They are loaded into
the company-owned shipping containers
for transport back to Europe as part of an
efficient closed-loop system.
As for how the new miniload system
is working out, the reports are decidedly
positive. “The receiving process from day
one has been a dream come true,” says
Paioletti. “Before, we had a separate packing area; now that has been eliminated by
combining the picking and packing at the
goods-to-person stations. It is so much
easier now.”
