ICA automated order assembly

Date: 21.03.2011

Industrial Conveying has devised a flexible automated stock keeping unit order collating and palletising system

March 21, 2011

Industrial Conveying has devised a flexible automated stock keeping unit (SKU) order collating and palletising system which can be directly linked to production.

It can be utilised in distribution warehouses for order assembly and dispatch of products. Up until now, this task has predominantly been carried out manually.

Individually tailored for any company with limited, or hundreds, of SKUs the technology is applicable across the industry spectrum including third party warehousing, food manufacturing industry, retail distribution, pharmaceuticals, packaged meat and poultry supply – virtually any packaged goods requiring distribution.

The application integrates any combination of Industrial Conveying’s technologies including robots, gantries, layer picking, layer transfer and disassembly, cassette loading, sortation and palletising.

Sub systems normally include case and pallet conveyor system, bar code and/or RFID scanning and ASRS warehouse in some instances.

Enormous benefits may be achieved where the order assembly system is directly linked to production.

Product need only be handled once, eliminating the requirement for bulk palletising after production, and in some instances totally eliminating the need for warehouse storage and picking.

The company’s Project Design team concentrated its efforts on developing solutions for the Australasian market.

Businesses that palletise in layers, rainbow pallets, and those that column or random stack, have been specifically targeted.
These are among the most demanding and most common order assembly methods in Australia.

The system will speed up production facilities or warehouses that survive on multiple stock picking, shaving time off distribution of multi-orders.

Industrial Conveying has developed a system by which certain technologies can be mixed and matched to provide the optimum cost effective solution.

Layer picking, for example, involves robotised pick-up of entire layers of product to be assembled on pallets for entire orders.

This volume-driven solution is ideal for companies that predominantly sell on layers, such as those supplying soft drinks or chips or
washing powders.

Likewise, rainbow pallets (where pallets slot in between layers of product) are suited to end-users such as the convenience store chains which would make a large order across a lot of stores, but have limited storage at each store.

For the even more complicated order picks, where one pallet comprises a multitude of products, made up of less than a complete layer of any one product, a gantry system with either single or column stack capability may be utilised.

All solutions depend on the type of business, the volumes and number of SKUs, however what ICA has set out to do is eliminate situations where personnel have to assemble orders by hand in paper driven systems.

Industrial Conveying offers a fully automated approach to eliminate manual order consolidation.