Bob Trebilcock

Materials handling at John Dewar & Sons: Less is more

If you write about materials handling day in and day out, you love bells and whistles. High speed conveyor systems, automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) and automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) are just cool to watch.

Cool factor aside, efficient materials handling should be about solving the problem at hand with no more resources than are necessary.

In other words, sometimes less is more.  

I was reminded of that lesson the other day after talking to John McKee, MIS manager for John Dewar & Sons, blender of Dewar’s White Label scotch, about the company’s new warehouse in Glasgow, the first of nearly 20 facilities the blender will build in the next few years.

Dewar’s facilities are warehouses in the truest sense. With some casks sitting in place for up to 25 years before blending, velocity is the last thing on Dewar’s mind.

The bigger challenge is how to keep track of the 1.4 million casks kept on hand at any given time. That’s why Dewar had three goals in mind when it came up with a plan a few years ago to update its facilities:

1. Optimize storage space
2. Implement an IT system that can quickly locate casks that might have been putaway years ago
3. Do that in an environment safe from explosions

The solution? Instead of storing individual casks in racks, which is the industry standard, Dewar is now stacking casks seven pallets high on the floor. Each of a warehouse’s eight bays can store a solid cube of 9,700 casks. Once they’re in place, they’re probably not moving until a blender is ready to use them.

Step two was to begin collecting data with a bar code scanning system to create a digital 3D map of the warehouse. That tracks the location of casks in a bay, regardless of whether the pallet is on the floor or the middle of the cube.

Finally, all of that was accomplished in a form factor that shields the scanning devices and cabling so no errant sparks can set off an explosion.

It’s as simple and elegant as a scotch neat, but it gets the job done with a minimum of searching on the part of warehouse operators who no longer have to keep track of the casks in their heads. 

You’ll be able to read more about Dewar in Modern Materials Handling this spring. Meanwhile, I’ll describe how Chrysler is using lights-out materials handling to complement lean manufacturing in my next blog.

If you’d like to talk about your most recent materials handling or information handling project, be sure to write me at Robert.Trebilcock@verizon.net. 

Posted by Bob Trebilcock on January 8, 2008 | Comments (1)