BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR
AS/RS
materialhandlingupdate
THE WALLOON REGION OF BELGIUM MAY BE
known to history for its battlefields, which include Waterloo
and the World War I sites of Mons and Liege, but it is also
the Idaho of Europe—in other words, it’s an area ideal-
ly suited for growing potatoes. The region’s “frites” are
world-renowned. Legend holds that American servicemen
stationed there in World War I called them “French” fries
after the language spoken in the region and then brought a
taste for the potato treat home with them.
Today, one of Belgium’s leading providers of cut potato
products is Mydibel. The family-owned company produces
some 225,000 tons of potato products annually, shipping
fries, hash browns, potato wedges and flakes, and more
than 700 stock-keeping units (SKUs) of products to 120
countries worldwide. The company doesn’t just process
potatoes; it grows them as well, cultivating a significant
share of the potatoes it sells.
The business has enjoyed tremendous growth in recent
years—the kind of growth that’s great for the bottom line
but tends to put a strain on the back-end operations. By
2011, Mydibel had outgrown its main production and distribution facility in the Southern Belgian city of Mouscron
and had resorted to renting four outside warehouses. But
that arrangement was proving both costly and inefficient.
“The problem was, we had to transport product back and
forth between the facilities, and we did not have good
visibility with all of the movement,” says Fabian Leroy,
Mydibel’s maintenance and project engineer. On top of
that, he says, the company was running up against the
limitations of its warehouse management system (WMS),
which could not be modified to accommodate the changes
that were needed.
In order to consolidate all of those operations under
one roof, the company began drawing up plans for the
construction of a highly automated warehouse
at the production site in Mouscron. Space was
limited at the Mouscron property, however,
which meant Mydibel would have to find ways
to maximize the available footprint. It contracted
with SSI Schaefer Systems to provide it with an
automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS)
located in a large high-bay freezer. In addition to
its Orbiter AS/RS, Schaefer supplied conveyors,
shuttle systems, controls, and its Wamas ware-
house management system to direct the distribu-
tion operations.
TATER TOWER
In keeping with the goal of maximizing space,
the new AS/RS is a deep-lane system designed to
provide very dense storage, holding significantly
more than the drive-in pallet racks located in the facility’s
existing storage areas. Not only has that allowed Mydibel
to consolidate the former satellite operations in one place,
but it has also reduced the company’s cooling and electricity bills by minimizing the size of the area that requires
refrigeration.
Today, the storage and retrieval processes unfold with
minimal human intervention. As pallets of finished products arrive from the plant’s processing and packaging
areas, automatic readers scan their bar codes to determine
whether they should go to a freezer with conventional
racking, mobile racks, or the Schaefer AS/RS until ready to
ship. Most finished goods are sent to the automated storage
system, while goods that require client-specific packaging
typically are directed to the conventional warehouse, where
they’re stored in drive-in racks and other pallet racks.
The pallets destined for the automated section are next
When it outgrew its main production and distribution facility, Mydibel, a Belgian
producer of frozen potato products, built an automated high-bay warehouse with
a state-of-the-art storage and retrieval system.
A hot new system
for cold storage
