Responsive, flexible, reliable manufacturing logistics solutions

The demand for smaller, more frequent deliveries has changed the supply cycle for many manufacturers from push to pull. In the following article, Dematic’s Manufacturing Logistics Specialist, David Rubie, provides some options for how to best to meet these changing market demands as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

Getting your products to market on time and at a competitive price is becoming increasingly challenging for manufacturers.

Retailers are demanding smaller, more frequent deliveries and tighter delivery windows.

Understanding how to meet these changing market demands as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible is core to the success of your business. And it is a never ending challenge, because technology and service expectations are constantly changing.

Today’s Manufacturing Challenge

Gone are the days when manufacturers could focus purely on what they were manufacturing! To be competitive in today’s markets, manufacturers must take a wider view, with end to end supply chain issues being just as important as manufacturing processes.

Legislative changes and labour availability make it harder than ever to manually handle more complicated orders and meet higher supply chain velocity.

Although centralisation allows scale effects, traditional long manufacturing runs are no longer possible. Manufacturers are facing ever-reducing supply chain lead times forcing a consolidation of inventory and processes.

Your target is to add value by lowering costs, speeding delivery, offering higher service levels, with greater accuracy, and providing your customers and suppliers with greater control and visibility.

Meeting the challenge can lead to success and considerable competitive advantage.

End to End Manufacturing Solutions
When you analyse the manufacturing process, it is a material flow challenge.
You need to receive all of your raw materials, store them until you are ready to make something, then bring them together in the correct sequence and quantities.

You then transform the raw materials into products and package them for ease of handling and transport.

Efficient handling, storage and material flow is essential at all stages of your supply chain to optimise your competitive advantage.

End of Line Handling Solutions

As manufactured goods exit the production line, they are packaged and packed in cartons or cases for handling and transport.

The most efficient way to handle and transport products over distance is by conveyor, and there are a wide variety of conveyor systems to suit different product characteristics and performance requirements.

End of line conveyors are an essential link between manufacturing and distribution. They must be fast enough to take product away from production to prevent interruptions and be reliable, as any stoppage quickly flows back to the production line.

Because of this, when Dematic designs a production handling system, we design for maximum system uptime using only reliable, proven conveyor technologies.

Transport conveyors, typically powered roller or belt conveyors, and accumulation conveyors interface to any number of devices such as elevators, storage systems, inducts, merges, diverts, in-line checkweighers, shipping stations or palletising.

High speed production lines feeding robotic palletising operations typically require a buffer to ensure system effectiveness. True zero-pressure accumulation conveyors minimise production interruptions and maximise total system efficiency.

High Speed Merging & Sorting Solutions

It’s often necessary to bring products from several areas together to facilitate efficient transport and then sort them back into their individual product groupings for palletising, storage and shipping.

To do so efficiently requires balanced product flow. Feeding a sorter consistently means on-time delivery to your customers, increases system throughput and eliminates bottlenecks.

Sound sortation system designs begins at the merge, which stages and feeds product continuously.

The induct identifies the product, works out where it’s got to go and creates the gap for sortation allowing the sorter to run at optimal speed.

Straight Line Sorters are most cost-effective where the number of sortation points required is relatively small, for instance, up to 40-50 delivery points, and throughput rates up to 12,000 items per hour.

Continuous Loop Sorters provide a much greater degree of functionality and flexibility, and may be designed to handle much higher throughput rates of up to 40,000 items per hour, as well as sort to several hundred delivery points.

They are also easier to merge goods onto, and may be used for other functions, such as transferring goods from one part of a facility to another, from one process to another, and consolidating items from various areas.

Different types of diverts can be used including sliding shoe, pivot arm, pop-up wheels, tilt-trays and crossbelt sorters, with selection based on factors including product characteristics, the speed of the conveyor and the required throughput.

Manual and Automated Palletising Solutions

Before you can store or ship your goods, the individual cartons need to be consolidated as a unit load.

The high cost of labour and increasingly restrictive OH&S regulations concerning manual handling makes a strong case for automated palletising.
Automated palletising systems provide reliable, around the clock performance, and may be designed to handle individual cartons or full pallet layers of goods in higher throughput applications.

Advances in product recognition technology including vision and profiling systems now enable robotic palletisers to handle mixed streams of goods and build pallets of mixed products.

Depending on manufacturing volume, a number of palletising strategies are available:

Manual Palletising
Manual palletising poses OH&S challenges, so ergonomic pallet building platforms may be used to minimise operator lift and rotation.

Gantry/Portal Robots
Gantry or Portal Robots can increase speed and flexibility with access to larger areas and more pallets.

Articulated Robots
Articulated Robots further improve palletising rates by offering even greater speed and flexibility of operation.

Unit Load Handling Options

Once the finished goods have been assembled into a palletised unit load, handling options range from manually operated techniques such as pallet trucks and forklifts, through to fully automated solutions such as Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), unit load conveyors, pallet shuttle carts and electrified overhead monorails.

Automated pallet conveyors and electrified monorails are fast, accurate and reliable methods of transporting unit loads to storage or despatch, where they can interface with automatic truck loading/unloading systems.

Real-Time Wireless Picking Solutions

Enterprise-wide, real-time information management and communications systems are vital to ensure you know what is going where, and when, at any given time of the day.

The use of wireless data networks to real-time enable the transfer of data is now a standard feature of most DCs.

RF, RFID and Voice-Directed Computing reduce errors, improve OH&S and productivity and provide real-time track and trace functionality from goods receipt to despatch.

These technologies are used with numerous picking concepts to maximise productivity and throughput.

Voice-directed order picking prompts the operator through a series of tasks with clear, verbal commands. 

These are transmitted in real-time by a radio frequency (RF) system that interfaces with the user’s host WMS or ERP system. 

The operator wears a small headset and the lightweight, portable voice-computer is attached to a belt around their waist. 

This keeps both hands free at all times while picking and, because the operator doesn’t need to waste time looking at and reading the data on a screen or picking list, OH&S and productivity are significantly enhanced. 

Automatic Case, Layer & Pallet Picking Solutions

With retailers demanding smaller, more frequent deliveries, manufacturers are seeking a more cost-effective solution to case, layer and mixed pallet building.

New developments in vision and laser recognition systems, and pallet building software, have enabled significant advances in automated picking.

Automated picking solutions which provide accurate, reliable and flexible operation, are becoming increasingly available including

• Automated Storage & Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) for pallets and unit loads, such as totes and crates
• Multi-shuttles, a new concept for retrieving unit loads
• Robotic and dedicated layer pickers
• Vision-enabled robotic case picking
• Automated case sequencing systems.
• A variety of Robotic and Dedicated Layer Pickers with a multitude of flexible gripper heads are available to suit most package types. Designed to operate in multi-shift applications, these technologies offer significant advantages to manufacturers.

Manually assembling pallets with layers is a labour-intensive, physically demanding and costly exercise.

Automated Layer Pickers are fast, reliable and cost-effective options for handling whole layers of almost any product, from cases to shrink-wrapped packs of bottles and cans.

They enable the user to assemble multi-product pallets to customer orders without the costs, OH&S concerns and product damage associated with manual handling.

Real-Time, Integrated Order Management & Control

High speed production handling systems rely on the seamless integration of equipment, controls and software.

Interfacing these sub-systems with the host computer is essential for efficient material flow and machine control, but also captures essential transaction data for the Historian database.

Potential legislative changes concerning the traceability of manufactured goods, along with retailer requirements, will lead to a greater need for track and trace in manufacturing logistics applications.

Efficient material flow and control requires real-time data communications.
This functionality is provided via the Warehouse Control System (WCS), which interfaces with the Warehouse Management System (WMS) and/or the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

The WCS communicates in real-time with all of the various sub-system elements, such as package handling and unit load handling conveyors, automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), sorters, palletisers and the like, and is responsible for location control, material flow control and order fulfilment.

Wireless real-time data communications including Radio Frequency (RF) systems and Voice-Directed Computing may also be interfaced to the WCS, or directly to the WMS, if it is real-time enabled.

Dematic Manufacturing Logistics Applications in Action

A CDROM featuring videos and details of several best practice manufacturing logistics applications from around the world is available by contacting Dematic.

For more information, please contact David Rubie:

david.rubie@dematic.com
Ph. 61 (0) 408 443 358