Material Tracking and Control Software
The heart of integrated material handling systems

Establishing the Need

When you talk about value in material handling systems, invariably, the ability to know what you have, where you have it, and where it is going – without error, is the key to making a material handling system pay for itself. Simply controlling material flow is not enough. In the world of distribution, whether manufacturing or retail, real-time information is everything.

The key to being able to justify material handling equipment is the ability to create performance over time, usually small amounts of time. That means that real-time knowledge of inventory status, planning for work or order fulfillment, material movement execution, and absolutely accurate tracking are critical to the success of capital-intensive equipment.

High-speed conveyors, sorters, accumulators are pretty much junk without the logic to operate them at the speeds most users find the equipment justifies at. In the world of FDA regulated businesses, cradle to grave tracking is critical as well, not only for fulfilling business performance issues, but for meeting the paper trail elements needed when recalls or other quality issues appear.

Structure for Material and Tracking Control Systems

The Brains:
So now we can accept that the world wants material and tracking controls, what can we say about structure? Perhaps we need to back up a bit and talk about theory. For a very long time, the world of IT (Information Technology) has accepted that some technology works better than others for certain tasks. For instance, Information and Data Collection for complex databases, such as on-hand inventory in a warehouse or AS/RS requires stability and speed, as well as flexibility for sorting and reporting. The fairly recent advent of the relational database, such as Oracle or Progress (trademarks), has triggered the ability to build huge repositories of complex information. Moreover, this was made possible by the development of high speed processing that the new generations of processors have made available, often at relatively low cost compared to a few years ago. It is in this realm of processor and application software, that regardless of your preference for operating systems, the material handling control system depends on managing events in real or at least near real time. The reliability of such systems when redundancy is very high, allowing a large DC (distribution center) to move products from storage to order or WIP using complex algorithms that sort the many fields of information in the database for pertinent bits and pieces that are needed.

For example, in a beef processing plant, real-time knowledge of products by SKU (stock keeping unit), date code, grade, weight and location are critical to the shipping department’s ability to make decisions about the best matches of inventory to customer requirements. A well designed database and material control software can quickly support order-processing decisions, and have enough horsepower to report on the activity in almost any form. So effectively, decision-making around inventory control at high reliability can live at this level with high reliability, repeatability and visibility.

The Brawn:
The level where the work occurs, such as management of cases on a conveyor or sorter, is usually managed by PLCs (programmable controllers). These industrialized computers can manage from small to large amounts of inputs and outputs. Given destination, timing and priority information, PLCs can receive information from barcode or RFID readers and know what to do with and where cases or pallets should go. The ability to either track the material flow by logical progression or regularly validate the information is part of this ‘brawn’ level of material tracking and control. It is typical to hand off the ID of a pallet or case to a PLC at a transition point and let the PLC maintain the location and ID of the material until it comes to its next logical hand-off or leaves the system. Every material handling system can have more or less inputs and outputs, depending on its need to know and the type and speed of tracking being done. Designing to manage this is the art of good material tracking and control systems.

Bulletproof:
The other aspect of these systems that is essential is the ability to report their status to a human readable interface, often graphical, to allow operations to interact, query, or recover from error conditions. Having the right mix of responsive data management at the fingertips of operators can make the difference between success and failure in a material tracking and control system. For instance, if you are moving 100 or more pallets per hour along a conveyor, totally unattended, you can’t afford to have an unexpected material handling event create an error that disrupts you for an hour. The well-designed system carries incremental validations at multiple levels of handoff to assure that when something goes wrong, the event is traceable at the lowest level and recoverable with little human intervention or validation.

Pretty:
A good material control system is user friendly at the GUI (graphical user interface) level and can be made to look over information at lower and lower levels of detail, usually via multiple screens. The language of the pull downs and display data needs to be the same as the operation uses when looking at material processes and specifically technical issues at lower levels. For example, if a pallet label is called a license plate in the generic language of the operation, that should be the description in a pop-up or pull down. This makes the customer specific information understood by almost anyone who ‘talks the talk’ of the plant or DC. This comes from the design getting its basis in the early stages of gathering ‘functional requirements’ from the customer. Interfaces generally mirror processes at the top levels and need to reflect material flow activity that is in keeping with how people do business in the operation.

For example, a tracking screen showing a pallet or case may need to show a color code for client specific product that is on-route to a palletizer via case sorters. This could be a result of special requirements for the customer order that the product meets and in the event of a problem, seeing it as a color code quickly identifies a likely course of action for any event or activity tied to the material handling. If a screen is a remote diagnostic screen, a color code can be a rapid way for an operator to see a problem with equipment or material flow and rapidly correct the problem.

Visibility:
So pretty is good and so is visible. If decisions are made rapidly, customizing screens to make information visible to meet on-the-fly decisions is critical as well. Many material-handling systems must manage time-based allocation of products to meet manufacturing or distribution demands. In this way, getting the right product to the right place at the right time is the critical dimension of material tracking and control software.

For example, committing case products that are date coded to orders that are constantly changing based on order matching and truck loading/scheduling can be tricky. Loading a date coded food product to a truck when another option was available but not visible can mean that the product is closer to losing value from spoilage. The ability to have visibility to a dynamic inventory that changes by thousands of cases per hour can be valuable, especially if you can change the committed products to orders on the fly. Rapid decisions tied to good material handling and control can allow postponement strategies to flourish.

Me Talk Pretty
Material tracking and control systems must be able to talk to ERP and WMS computers as the equipment and operations dictate. Clearly, customization here is required to assure that reconciliation between manufacturing and distribution can occur or between the perpetual inventory and the local inventory can occur. Ascertaining the validity of data between systems, the real-time activity, and alignment between systems is a critical component of such systems. The interface design for linking to corporate management systems is the piece that must be looked at logically and take into account the constraints of the information systems, speed of information exchange, integrity of messaging, and limits of lower level control systems to act upon and maintain data that must be updated and either recorded or discarded. IN this area, the material tracking and control system design is key.

Summing it up
To put it in a few words, material tracking and control software should be standard as possible, non-proprietary, flexible, version managed, repeatable, user friendly, real-time, incorruptible, visible at all layers of needed information and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Essentially, the value of an operation is greatly enhanced when the decision process for operations is customized to the business requirements and the entire platform makes the operation of AS/RS, AGVs, unit and case conveyors, palletizers, sorters, stretch wrappers, labelers and so on responsive to changes in the business and reliable enough to support quality and logistics operations.