Conveyors pump out health care products at Beiersdorf
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 9/15/1999
There's a gleaming new 252,000 sq ft distribution center in North Cincinnati. It belongs to Beiersdorf, Inc., a $4.3 billion manufacturer and distributor of health and skin care products worldwide, with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany.The new facility, complete with extensive conveyor systems and high-speed sortation, takes the place of three older warehouses.
Beiersdorf now ships more volume out of less total space with 25% fewer employees than it did from three separate older DCs. Percentages for picking and shipping accuracies and on-time delivery rate now are all in the 98% to 99% range. Rush orders can be turned around in an hour, from the time they're dropped into the WMS. Meanwhile, the new DC consistently meets an elapsed time from order placement to ship-to-customer date of 48 hours.
"We were running our U. S. distribution operations with late 1970s technology - and achieving only the corresponding levels of efficiency," recalls Beiersdorf's Randy Suer, director of distribution. He remembers how "our three distribution facilities had maxed out. We had plenty of inventory on hand, but we didn't have the right mix of SKUs in the right places."
To maintain the firm's core focus on customer service, Beiersdorf execs began making plans to strive for a better, more technologically advanced distribution system. With the help of a consulting engineering and systems implementation firm, the company completed a project to automate.
From a blank sheet of paper to a new building, up and running with full automation, the team met a schedule that some executives initially didn't think was achievable.
The key handling technologies for the new DC are:
- a full case order selection module for picking to belt conveyor from pallet flow and case flow storage;
- a split case order selection module for picking from case flow storage to conveyor;
- high-speed conveyor sortation;
- a 6-high, very narrow aisle rack system for reserve storage;
real-time RF communications;
- an upgraded WMS.
Beiersdorf's business is weighted towards full- case shipments, with a smaller but still significant levels of split-case picking. Because of the efficiency of the full-case picking operation, it is easy for the split-case portion of the wave to fall behind full case.
The system was designed to accommodate this condition by incorporating a large stretch of accumulation conveyor between the split-case pick module and the sortation merge. This allows the split-case portion of the wave to be released for picking ahead of the full-case portion and held until the sorter is ready for that wave.
Full- and split-case cartons are inducted onto the high-speed shoe sorter and diverted to either the small parcel line of one or 12 less-than-truckload divert lanes.
"In addition to much greater efficiencies in picking and shipping, the system has simply taken us to a whole new level of accuracy and shipment integrity," says Suer. "Every individual carton has each pick confirmed via RF scan, and each carton must be accounted for by the system and scanned to the proper outbound pallet before the order is released for shipment."
The results today speak for themselves. The new distribution center uses very narrow aisle, high bay storage systems, mechanized picking, and automated sortation technologies. They are tightly integrated with an upgraded warehouse management system and a radio frequency data communications system. Together, these technologies help achieve Beiersdorf's goals for high customer service and throughput, and major cost efficiencies.
Forte Industries
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