Whole ranges of products in internet retailing are manufactured in Asia which are then are shipped to Europe in large batches to be distributed from central warehouses. The quality of the cases that are used is not always the best, because low cost packaging is important. Transport damage to the case is common. The variety of case dimensions is huge: everything available will do, and plastic bags are wrapped around cases to prevent products from falling out. This is more than one reason why many companies in Warehousing and Distribution believe automation is not possible. At one of CSi’s UK customers, CSi proved them wrong, again. The internet retailer decided to automate the process in order to improve productivity. Working in 3 shifts there were 4 to 5 employees active per dock to lift and palletise the products and now with CSi’s automated solution this is reduced to only one person per dock.
CSi received the lead for this project from a supplier of Warehousing and Distribution automation. The fact that CSi had excellent reference projects played an important role in the selection by the customer who considered automation with robots the best solution. Although CSi can also deliver robotic palletising systems, it was proposed to use the high capacity C5000 palletiser.
Two reasons prevailed:
1. The stacking accuracy of a layer palletiser is higher than that of robot palletisers. This is important to prevent problems in the automated warehouse to which the palletising system is connected.
2. A layer palletiser achieves higher capacity in cases per minute thus reducing the number of stations needed.
The customer also decided to purchase CSi equipment when they saw examples of the intuitive user interface – the visualisation of product flows into the palletiser and the automatic pallet pattern generator lowered the threshold for automation in a previously manual warehouse where people are not familiar with sophisticated technology.
Reliability of the system is always an important aspect and CSi is well known for delivering robust equipment with high levels of system availability. In this case it was chosen to form batches (trains) of cases. The combination of high capacity and wide variety of cases resulted in this type of solution. The barcode of the first and the last cases were read and the number of cases in between was simply counted at several places in the system.
The process as such is not very complicated. Cases are taken from the containers in which they were stacked and put on a conveyor and directly transported up. Case conveying does not occupy square metres on the despatch floor. Cases are registered, sorted, merged and accumulated to create the required pallet batch. Just before palletising, CSi implemented a dynamic dosing system which allows even higher capacities to be palletised.
Dynamic dosing makes it possible to optimise the distance between cases depending on the size of the cases. The C5000 layer palletiser handles the cases at high speed and despite the relatively large cases, the palletising capacity can be as high as 60 cases per minute. Change over from one case to the other is done automatically on the basis of barcode recognition, with no human interference and does not cost any time. Full pallets are strapped and automatically transported to the high bay warehouse.
CSi UK
Tel: 01244 341298
Email: info@csiportal.com
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