Programming of a material flow system and app development for a distribution centre for chemicals an
Initial situation
The distribution centre supplies several thousand international customers with chemicals and special materials. Previously, order picking was carried out entirely manually at the distribution centre. However, due to increasing demand, this manual process reached its capacity limits. The manual handling could no longer meet the rising requirements efficiently, necessitating an adjustment of the existing workflow.
Objective
The goal was to automate or partially automate the existing processes to achieve significantly higher order-picking performance without changing staffing levels.
The general contractor provided automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and a central conveyor system to enable the automated transport and consolidation of individual partial orders. A central system was required to act as an interface with the existing SAP system, consolidate partial orders, integrate existing handheld scanners and provide route management for the efficient distribution of transport boxes to the appropriate workstations.
Our services
As a subcontractor for this project, we integrated a powerful material flow system that efficiently manages the entire material flow, from storage to dispatch. In line with this, we developed a customised application that integrates all necessary interfaces, including the SAP system, small parts conveyor technology and the control system for the AGVs.
The application provides precise route management with real-time error handling, enabling optimal control of transport routes. Furthermore, it consolidates partial orders and ensures the automatic and balanced allocation of orders to workstations. It simultaneously offers a clear overview of all active orders with a filter function, enabling easy and efficient tracking.
Results and benefits
The new solution achieved a significant increase in order-picking performance while automatically reporting all order data back to the SAP system. The application offers a clear and structured display of all active orders, including the ability to track the position of individual partial orders and the status of the overall order.
The optimised route guidance ensures efficient control of the AGVs and the automatic order distribution provides balanced workload distribution across workstations. This allowed our client not only to improve the efficiency of its processes but also to prepare optimally for future challenges.