Vanderlande Industries: heading for fully automated warehouses
Vanderlande Industries has an in-depth understanding of business processes in warehousing and distribution. The company provides competitive automated solutions for goods receiving, storage, order picking, consolidation and shipping. With flexible and innovative solutions that meet the changing market demands.
Today’s warehouses and distribution centres face a lot of challenges: increasing labour costs, less available space and frequent small orders with short delivery times. It’s a constant search for solutions that reduce operational costs, generate higher productivity, optimise space utilisation and enable high service levels.
Innovation is key
To keep up with these changing demands, innovation is key. Herman Vincent, Senior Program Manager Warehousing R&D at Vanderlande, sees a trend towards fully automated warehouses. “Because of the rapid technological improvements in recent years, more ideas become reality. Electronic devices are smaller, controls are able to act via wireless communication, batteries last longer and longer and are rechargeable faster”. Vincent sums up, “That makes automation easier.”
From fiction to reality in a decade
Warehouse Management Systems and high level controls now make the impossible possible. Things that seemed like science fiction only about a decade ago are now reality. “Like our Load Forming Logic”, Vincent explains. “LFL is in house developed software that combines stacking software solutions and robot gripper technology from several partners. This leads to high throughput palletizing, high stacking density and family grouping. That means the pallet is built up according to the store planogram, while taking into account the different shapes and sizes of the various food retail cases. This minimises the transport costs and improve the in store efficiency, as the pallet or roll cage stays in a store aisle and the number of family groups per pallet are reduced.“ In the past solutions like this were impossible. But nowadays a high end computer can make the right calculations real quick. So the software has improved, as well as the computers. These are the enablers for our innovations.”
Automation still not standard
Even though warehouse automation has become common in recent years, according to Vincent it is still not standard. “There are companies who don’t automate or who only partially automate. It also depends on what market you look at. We see that in Parts & Components companies choose high end solutions, while in Food Retail companies often still choose manual solutions. Even when an automated solution is available. At the same time our company and our competitors still develop new solutions and concepts. So I would say innovation in warehouse automation is still developing. So, no, I wouldn’t say automation is the standard solution for all companies dealing with the challenges as mentioned above.”
Sustainability as part of innovation
The Program Manager R&D sees a trend towards fully automated solution however, also in Food Retail. He mentions Automated Case Picking (ACP) as an example to underline this statement. “ACP is a complete solution from depalletizing via case picking to the order assembly line and finally after palletising again to consolidation and shipping.” Also shuttle technology is still considered to be innovative. Furthermore, developments in shuttle technology and concepts are still in progress. “And Vanderlande Industries is also pretty far in developing sustainable solutions”, adds Vincent finally. “Such as our crossorters, which as far as possible are recyclable. Or our Microshuttle, that is not only scalable and flexible, but also very energy efficient.”
Want to find out more about our sustainable crossorter? Watch the video on www.vanderlande.com