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new piece of equipment; you also have
to consider where it should be physically
located and how it will fit into the overall
flow of the operation, says Jason Denmon,
apparel and specialty retail industry leader
at the distribution consulting and design
engineering firm Fortna. “When I think
about logical flow, I first of all ask, does it
fit without being too jammed in?” he says.
“Does it cause congestion? Does it cause
too much travel time for employees as they
move to and from their work area? Does
it logically fit into the flow of operations,
as it goes from step one to step two to step
three?”
Thinking about the logical flow also
means considering the “ripple effect” on
equipment and processes both upstream
and downstream, Denmon says. Even if it
appears that a new piece of equipment will
fit into the operation nicely, further investi-
gation might reveal that, say, the added vol-
ume from the new area will quickly over-
whelm capacity downstream. To avoid this
type of problem, Denmon recommends
mapping out the new operation in detail
before proceeding with any installation.

4Don’t ignore the software. A key part of that mapping exercise should be determining how the different software and controls will communicate with one another. It is this piece of an integration project that often turns out to be the most complex and expensive, says Bob Babel, vice president, engineering and implementation, for Forté Industries, a planning, design, and integration firm owned by Swisslog. “If a WMS is talking to one WCS (warehouse control system) for a pick-to-light system and another for a sortation conveyor, and now another for print-and-apply (equipment), it gets very complicated,” he observes.

According to Moris, the work involved in making sure the various pieces are talking to one another can cost as much as the rest of the project put together. He recalls one proposed project where the numbers were all falling into place—that is, it appeared that the labor, material, and space savings would easily offset the cost of the new equipment—until the cost of integrating the system with the company’s WMS was factored in. “And then the financial justification just went right out the systems integrator Intelligrated.

This will help ensure you select
equipment that’s able to keep
up with both current and future
demand.

In addition to collecting the necessary order data, be sure you provide your integrator with up-to-date information on your current material handling systems, advises Steve Brandt, vice president of business development and customer service for systems integrator Dematic. That’s particularly true if you’ve made modifications to your systems after the original install, he says. Otherwise, your integrator is going to end up drafting a plan for connecting the old and new equipment based on outdated information, and costly rework will be needed later on.

2Beware of having “too many cooks.” If you’re connecting equipment from two or more vendors, make sure that all of the teams are working together and that someone is in charge of the overall project. Otherwise, you risk having a situation where each vendor is focusing only on its own “island of automation,” with no one paying attention to the whole archipelago, so to speak.

For example, if you’re creating a new packaging line using equipment that produces boxes on demand, someone has to decide how the conveyors will feed into the equipment and make sure the scanner’s programmable logic controller (PLC) can communicate directly with the WMS. These details might not occur to someone who’s focused solely on one part of the installation.