BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR
AS/RS
WORKING IN A FREEZER FOR AN EIGHT-HOUR SHIFT
is among the most difficult jobs in the supply chain world.
In order to spare workers (and forklifts) from having to
toil in adverse conditions—think temperatures that dip to
a frosty minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit—a new warehouse in
Richland, Wash., is instead relying on an automated storage
and retrieval system (AS/RS) from Dematic to handle most
of the work. The AS/RS is believed to be one of the largest
ever built in a freezer. It offers over 36 million cubic feet
of storage capacity and can handle throughput volumes in
excess of 250 trucks and 20 railcars a day.
The Richland facility, which opened in July, is owned and
operated by Preferred Freezer Services, a New Jersey-based
company with 35 refrigerated warehouses in the U.S. and a
handful of others in Asia.
As a public warehouse company, Preferred Freezer
Services built the facility to serve the needs of a specific
group of clients, primarily potato growers in the Pacific
Northwest. One of the facility’s larger customers is Lamb
Weston, a supplier of frozen vegetable products that is part
of ConAgra Foods.
The new facility offers 455,000 square feet of refrigerated
space, with 312,000 of it dedicated to the automated freezer. The AS/RS within measures 116 feet high and features
deep-lane racking served by 15 storage/retrieval cranes. The
system provides very dense storage for more than 117,000
pallets of frozen french fries, hash browns, and other frozen products. The steel pallet racks, supplied by Frazier
Industrial, also serve as the main structural support for the
freezer’s walls and roof.
HIGH AND MIGHTY
A majority of the goods handled at the new facility arrive in
Preferred Freezer Services’ company-owned trucks, rather
than in vehicles operated by its clients or outside carriers.
Preferred Freezer has learned that the more of its supply
chain it handles itself, the lower the risk that products will
be damaged or will jam up its automated handling systems.
Therefore, about 65 percent of incoming goods are trans-
ported in Preferred Freezer’s trucks.
“We want to make sure we control the flow, so we made
the decision to use our own people,” says Burnie Taylor,
director of major capital projects and general manager in
Richland.
The trucks pick up finished goods at production plants
located within 50 miles of Richland. The vehicles that
transport these goods are equipped with conveyance sys-
tems inside the 53-foot reefer trailers. Upon arrival at the
Richland facility, they’re directed to one of four automated
docks, where the pallets are conveyed off the trailers and
loaded onto a pallet monorail system for transport to the
AS/RS. The monorail consists of hanging carts with roller
beds. The pallets simply roll off the conveyor and onto the
carts. A scanning system then records each pallet number
and captures the load’s dimensions to ensure it can be han-
dled by the automated system.
The remaining 35 percent of inbound goods (those not
arriving on company trucks) enter the facility via commer-
cial trucks. There are six rail doors in the building and 14
other inbound truck docks in addition to the automated
doors. Most of the products not delivered by company
trucks are either floor stacked, rest on other pallets, or
reside on slipsheets. These have to be manually transferred
to slave pallets that are suitable for use in the automated
system. The pallets are then loaded onto the monorail for
transport to the AS/RS.
materialhandlingreport
Despite the sub-zero temps, no one’s complaining about working conditions in
the freezer of North America’s largest refrigerated warehouse. That’s because it’s
“staffed” by a sophisticated mega-AS/RS that performs virtually all of the work.
www.dcvelocity.com OCTOBER 2015 DC VELOCITY 47
Freeze frame!
