Island life: Warehousing and materials handling in focus

Islands of Automation. 20 years ago the phrase would have had brought many factory production directors to their knees in despair. They had won the boardroom battle to invest in automation only to find that their whizzy new machines on the shopfloor couldn't talk to each other, couldn't swap data. They had in effect invested in equipment that couldn't communicate with anything else, least of all the company's management systems. Islands of automation. Aaargh!

Yet John Harper still talks enthusiastically about islands of automation. As sales manager of logistics solutions supplier Dematic, he believes a lot of manufacturers' warehouse operations could benefit from islands of automation small bits of automation such as a shrink wrapper for pallets, or an end-of-line pallet conveyor, or an automated order picking system such as voice picking.

Today, the IT industry has eliminated the problems of machine communication with the development of factory-floor networking techniques such as Modbus, Fieldbus and Ethernet. Now any piece of automation, in islands or otherwise, can talk to any other and to the company's computer management systems. Yet many food manufacturing companies tend to think materials handling and warehousing automation is not for them, says Harper. "But voice picking, for example, is quite cheap and pays back pretty quickly, with most implementations paying back within six months.

"We can also combine voice picking with laser-guided trucks so that where companies are picking onto a pallet, the pallet can now be taken away by a truck that drives itself. As the picker says he's picked an item, the truck moves off on its own to the next location. And the next truck rolls up with the next pallet."

Laser-guided trucks​

Laser-guided trucks are ideal, says Harper, where you have got product coming off the end of the line that has to be taken somewhere else and the company is employing drivers to do this. "At best it's a mundane job for them: just picking something off a line and taking it somewhere else, all day long. Laser-guided trucks will happily do that 24 hours a day without a driver. And you can add further trucks as and when you need."

But today's laser-guided trucks are not like the old automatically guided vehicles (AGVs), that ran around on a fixed track or followed buried wires or metal tape stuck on the floor, says Harper. "Laser trucks are standard lift trucks or pallet trucks that have had laser guidance added. They can still be driven as manual trucks and, from the outside, they don't look much different. But they have a pole on top with a laser that is spinning to detect reflective strips stuck around the warehouse."

A truck needs to be able to see three of those strips at any one time in order to know where it is in the warehouse, says Harper. "With a bit of software we can teach the truck a map of the warehouse and the route that it is allowed to take in the warehouse." You can either import this information into the truck or take the truck around to every location in the warehouse and it will learn the route, he adds.

The trucks also carry scanners looking ahead for obstructions. If a scanner detects anything, a truck will slow up and keep slowing up until that object moves. If the object doesn't move, the truck it will just sit there and wait until it does. You can also program the trucks to overtake other trucks, if necessary, he says.

"When you are using laser trucks for tramming just delivering stuff from A to B, not picking then they are automatically driven in the optimal way. There's no stopping and starting, no acceleration, no braking, just a steady speed. As a result, the battery lasts a lot longer." So, not Top Gear in the warehouse, then? "Definitely not!"

And, unlike the islands of automation of two decades ago, laser-guided truck systems can easily be integrated into a company's warehouse management system, says Harper. "We have a traffic management system as part of our warehouse control system. It's a bit like a taxi central control. The warehouse control system or warehouse management system will know there is a pallet ready in such and such a place that needs to go to such and such a place. It will then send the nearest truck to go and do that job."

As for payback, it is a clear-cut decision with laser trucks, says Harper. "If you are running three shifts, then you save three drivers for every truck you've got. With voice picking coupled to laser trucks, you will also save on the cost of pickers because you will be working at higher efficiency and you will save guys having to go around with the trucks."

Bright future​

Fork truck manufacturer Jungheinrich also sees a bright future for laser-guided trucks in the food industry. It has recently launched, or rather relaunched, its range of automated pallet movers (APMs).

In the mid 1980s it was very popular, particularly in the food and drink industry, to use AGVs to replace people employed to move pallets of goods from the end of the production line out to distribution areas or warehouses. But AGVs got a mixed reception, says Steve Richmond, general manager of Jungheinrich UK.

"A lot of the software wasn't very stable. And the trucks were wire-guided so if you changed the layout of your plant or equipment you had to dig up the floor to re-route the wire. However, over the past couple of years people have started looking at AGVs and automated pallet movers again," says Richmond.

"As the cost of labour has increased and as warehouses and manufacturing facilities have got bigger, customers have started to ask us how they can automate some of the transport routes between fixed destinations typically between manufacturing and warehousing or distribution. 'I've got a guy constantly taking a pallet off the end of the production line and trucking it 400m to the despatch area and back again. How can we automate that process?'"

As a result, Jungheinrich has revamped its APM system with a new range. The software platform is now very stable, says Richmond, and the equipment uses laser guidance rather than wires buried in the floor. "So if you change your plant, your equipment, or your route, you can now easily program in the new route." Also, he says, costs have come down. "Typically old AGVs picked up pallets off the floor, or you designed a roller bed for them. What we have done is use a standard range of Jungheinrich stackers. That means our fork-type APM can now pick up from the end of a production line, for example, and place the pallet on the floor, on a conveyor, or into a storage rack.

"The APM is a cost-effective way of replacing people who are trucking pallets from one place to another. You want your production people doing what they do best, which is running the production plant, not shifting pallets."

All about the software​

But according to Richmond, it is the software behind materials handling systems that is becoming increasingly important in the food manufacturing industry.

As a result, Jungheinrich has launched its own warehouse management system (WMS). "More and more companies are looking to us to provide the whole thing: from the mechanical handling equipment to the WMS," says Richmond. "We therefore decided to develop our own WMS, rather than being reliant on third-party software companies and trying to integrate one of their solutions into our systems. Our approach is different to software houses in that we have developed our systems from bottom up. We have used our knowledge built over the past 50 years of what people want in terms of processing material flow, and then developed the solution upwards to encompass the information flow around the system."

Most companies have got some sort of host computer management system eg a conventional enterprise resource planning or materials requirement planning system, says Richmond. And they are very good at company administrative functions, such as scheduling raw materials and production into the manufacturing process.

But a lot of those systems have a gap in their functionality, he says. "Although they will be aware of all the materials within a system, they often treat it like a black box. Our systems operate at a much more detailed level everything from registering those goods as they enter the system, through to managing the cycle of that product right around the internal logistics and distribution process.

"Typically in the food industry, it will take account of things like batch traceability, shelf-life, best-before date, first-in, first-out, and last-in, first-out. Whatever needs to be done to a product from the end of manufacturing to the dispatch is what our WMS is responsible for. It is also responsible for optimising the flow of the resources the people and the trucks that are part of the internal logistics process.

"Our customers now have got a single point of contact [ie Jungheinrich] for software and mechanical handling equipment as well as radio data and hand-held devices, etc."

KEY CONTACTS​

Dematic - 01295 274 755​

Jungheinrich - 01908 363 100​