Selective Rack Relocation Case Study

Scope:

A company that sells office furniture was moving operations and required its current system to be removed and reinstalled in the new facility. Since their new facility was larger, the company also needed to add on a new system to accommodate its expansion.

Solution:

The company chose REB for this project because it was ideal for them to work with one provider for both phases of the project: the removal and reinstallation of the current system and installation of the new system.

The first phase included the removal of the current system and relocating to the new facility. REB was tasked with dismantling the system, packaging all components and arranging for safe transportation of the system to the new facility. This rack was then reinstalled at the new facility, but the layout design was modified to incorporate its new selective rack system.

The second phase was REB designing the new selective rack system to accommodate the company’s expansion in the new facility. The new system consisted of 440 bays of 42” and 44” deep pallet racking outfitted with wire deck to provide high accessibility of the company’s inventory.

When to Implement Warehouse Automation

Does your current warehouse or distribution center have an order fulfillment process that requires repetitive time-consuming or task-oriented processes? What about lengthy walking distances for order pickers to retrieve orders? If this sounds like your current warehouse, it may be time to consider implementing automation.

Automation aids in warehouse optimization. Automation not only increases picking accuracy but also frees up workers from those repetitive tasks which can improve employee productivity.

How to Evaluate if Your Operation Will Benefit from Automation

Effectively adding automation into your warehouse or distribution center starts with an analysis of your product storage and picking and staging characteristics.

When deciding if automation is right for you, it’s crucial to calculate your warehouse’s inventory, processes, and growth levels by SKU. Identifying certain characteristics of your inventory and processes will allow you to pinpoint where in your operation that could benefit from a faster, more automated process.

Things to be considered include:

• Do the products require special material handling equipment operated by an employee? If so, automation can speed up the handling of these products and free up that employee for other functions within the distribution center.
• Does your inventory require separate picking and staging zones because of varying weight and shape? These areas can be separate but should work together harmoniously. If there’s a lag in one of these areas, including the ‘in-between’ area of getting the products from picking to staging, then you are wasting valuable time and energy. Adding automation can make a dramatic difference in this case.
• Would you benefit from increased order accuracy? Using automated picking systems, you may see pick rates improve over 30% as well as an impressive reduction in picking errors of up to 60%.
• Do your employees spend a large amount of time simply traveling to and from pick locations? Automated systems, including good-to-person solutions, can dramatically increase pick rates by bringing the product to them vs. them traveling to the pick location.