It’s called “Communication Disconnect” – don’t let it happen to your distribution center! Here’s an example – a large warehouse operation was informed by their corporate IT resources that they were going to update the database for the facility’s automated system. It was supposed to be a seamless pro-active update to address a relatively small issue. What really occurred was a substantial database software upgrade. The upgrade caused a major failure in their system, halting plant production and delaying shipments. In fact, it took the majority of a day to explain to how this upgrade impacted operations, and roll back software changes, to get the site running again.
The disconnect happened because the stakeholders... Read more »
My final post in this series about adding value to your distribution center is regarding increasing productivity. We recently had a pharmaceutical manufacturer who needed to increase throughput to exploit a business opportunity. A boost in sales required this global medical technology company to increase its production and throughput rate in its current ASRS. Due to the time-sensitive nature of their products, the disruption to the operation and the risks involved in ramping up production needed to be considered.
To minimize risks and to ensure that the increase did not cause a bottleneck elsewhere in the system, we recommended a phased approach.... Read more »
Next in our blog series on “Adding Value” is an example of a complex project at a major snack food manufacturer. This customer desired to improve their system to ensure continuity in production and shipping. The primary goals of the project were to bring an existing system up to current industry standards for improved system load tracking, supportability and reliability. The ASRS system had operated reliably for fifteen years, transporting and storing totes containing the key ingredients of a snack mix and then loading the ingredients into continuous mixing hoppers, before returning the totes. However, the computer equipment and control systems were... Read more »
Can your automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) do more to add more value to your business? According to many conference speakers, customers, and financial experts, manufacturing workloads are being repatriated from Asia to North America. To take advantage of this trend many firms are exploring ways to get their share of this windfall and are asking more out of their automated systems. They usually know what’s needed and call engineering firms that specialize in ASRS to determine what’s possible. Issues like – “Can we add storage bays? Can we get the forks to extend further into the racks? Can we get the crane to carry two loads at once?” are easy to handle if you partner with the right vendor.
What’s not so easy to accomplish is an increase in throughput volume with outdated equipment and obsolete controls systems. Read more »
In making informed decisions about your warehouse modernization project, you will almost certainly need to rely on external subject matter experts to provide solutions. But, who is the most qualified and who can produce the best result for you? We believe that a major success factor lies in what the focus is of that resource.
Many equipment manufacturers’ objectives are to sell and install equipment. Because of this emphasis, the equipment will most likely be the metric that drives their entire design solution, whether it’s right for the business objectives or not. For instance, adding another crane may seem like a great solution to increase productivity. However, if it isn’t integrated properly within the rest of your warehouse operations, it may not streamline the flow and end up causing more havoc, whereas simply changing the configuration of the current setup would have been the best solution.
Conversely, an independent systems integrator commonly follows... Read more »
GUEST BLOGGER: I’m Nate Koflanovich, Senior Systems Engineer at Retrotech, Inc. I’ve been in the materials handling industry for over 16 years.
In previous weeks, we saw how reliability and availability could degrade system performance, and hinted at further degradation due to interdependence of equipment and processes within the system. In fact, poor system design can lead to the same outcome, even without reliability and availability issues.
The system’s performance relative to its capacity is called utilization. Utilization describes the amount of time the equipment spends productively executing work versus sitting idle. When designing the performance requirements for a system, consideration must be given to the effects of reliability and availability, but the system must also be designed to achieve high equipment utilization.
Low utilization in a system can be a symptom of overdesigning, or designing for an operation with a high peak-to average activity ratio. In this case, equipment is idle at times because there is no work to do. When we see low utilization combined with a failure to meet the business performance requirements, we have a utilization problem. Read more »
GUEST BLOGGER: I’m Nate Koflanovich, Senior Systems Engineer at Retrotech, Inc. I’ve been in the materials handling industry for over 16 years.
When an organization sets out to specify a new or modernized automated material handling system to support their business activities, performance is one of the key criteria. Often, though, performance criteria are written in terms of throughput alone, which does not capture the whole picture.
For almost 30 years, we have helped many customers overcome challenges in their material handling operations. Coming up with solutions for their distribution centers to either add automation or update/modernize. We thought it would be valuable to summarize some of the common pain points we’ve seen that trigger customers to give us a call. This will be the first of three (3) posts about this important topic.
Here’s what we hear every day as main concerns – Read more »
We talked last week about the years of progression towards warehouse automation. With these advancements, there are more and more demands put on distribution centers. Here are a few of the pressure points we are hearing about these days: customer demands, labor, space utilization, and energy consumption... Read more »
Companies usually think of what it costs to do a modernization project. But, an important aspect, often overlooked, is the cost of not doing a modernization project. These costs can be expressed as real expense or an opportunity cost. It can include lost revenues from a customer who will no longer tolerate missed delivery dates or inaccurate orders, or the escalating costs caused by errors or product damage. Or, perhaps your obsolete hardware does not have the capability to keep up with increasingly complex requirements.
As competitive environments heat up the demands on a distribution center can only intensify. Systems that are being asked to do what they were not designed to do, will eventually fail. When they do, the cost of inaction will easily exceed the cost of a modernization project.
Look at these important factors to help with your decision: Read more »
