Managing the flow of Nevada's wine and liquor
Automated materials handling processes take the gamble out of Silver State Liquor and Wine's ability to deliver accurate, on-time orders to its customers.
By Corinne Kator, Associate Editor -- Modern Materials Handling, 6/1/2007
Last spring, Silver State Liquor and Wine ended its relationship with a third-party distributor and opened its own 150,000 square foot distribution center near Reno, Nevada. And while there are plenty of wagers to lose in Reno, the new automated DC makes getting Silver State's deliveries out on time a sure bet.
During its peak season, Silver State receives six inbound shipments per day at its receiving docks. Most items arrive in less-than-full-pallet quantities and must be hand palletized for putaway.“We breakdown more than most DCs,” says Kyle Bohan, director of warehouse operations. “We bring in a lot of layers, a lot of onesy-twosies.”
Receivers carefully match inbound shipments with purchase orders. They note any mis-shipments in the company's business software before uploading the inventory data to the warehouse management system (WMS).
“We don't want to say we received something we didn't,” explains Bohan, “because we don't want to pay the taxes on it—and, of course, we don't want an inventory discrepancy from the very beginning.”
The WMS then generates bar coded labels for putaway. Wine is putaway in a refrigerated wine room with fast movers in pallet rack and slow movers in hand stack shelf rack. Other spirits are stored in pallet rack at room temperature with fast (A) and medium (B) moving products in the main storage area and slow (C) movers stored off to one side.
Silver State Liquor and Wine DC
Before order picking each night, the WMS compares the night's orders with inventory levels in the two pick modules. The WMS then directs replenishment for any pick locations that aren't full enough to accommodate the orders.
Order picking is directed by printed labels, which the WMS organizes into multiple waves based on the next day's delivery routes.
Case picking takes place in a three-level pick module in the center of the DC. Loose bottles are picked from a floor-level pick module. Both pick modules are slotted for fast, medium and slow movers.
After products are picked, they are placed on a conveyor that carries them overhead to a sliding shoe sorter for sorting to the proper shipping lanes. Just before the sort, products are scanned and deducted from WMS records.
“We've chosen to have our inventory deducted at this point because it can happen automatically,” says Bohan. “We choose this method to speed the picking process.”
When products reach the end of the shipping lane, they are either floor stacked in delivery trucks or manually palletized and loaded into the trucks using a pallet jack. Delivery trucks leave the shipping docks each morning organized and ready for the day's deliveries.
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