| Chemnitz
iFD-WMS commissioned at Ziegler Käsespezialitäten
For over 20 years, Ziegler Käsespezialitäten GmbH has been producing a wide variety of cheeses with a strong focus on premium quality and freshness, packaging them for its customers in the industrial, food service and food retail sectors. With the growth of recent years, space in the warehouses at the Wutha-Farnroda site had become increasingly tight. The logistics department had to handle ever-increasing volumes of goods. For this reason, the company decided to build a new logistics facility. For this major project, the introduction of an agile and highly available warehouse management system, including a transport control system, was essential.
The warehouse was designed as a high-bay warehouse, with additional use of two flow racks in the goods-in, goods-out and production supply areas.
To control internal transport in the raw materials area, an automated forklift from DS Automotion was integrated via an interface. There are plans to implement this process in the picking area in the future, where reach trucks are currently still in use. The system implementation has optimised and simplified existing processes, as well as increased transparency within intralogistics. Furthermore, the project aimed to improve warehouse structures through automatic storage location allocation.
The system manages the warehouse, which has approximately 1,500 storage locations, and interfaces with the ERP system as well as the DS Automotion software, which is responsible for controlling the automated forklift.
The AGV handles the storage of raw materials following goods receipt and also supplies the flow rack with raw materials for production. Transport orders, which the WMS transfers to the automated forklift for processing to meet production requirements, are made available to the production line via the flow rack by means of load units containing raw materials for production. The processing of transport orders in the goods-in and raw materials area is scheduled by the automated forklift according to its own prioritisation.
The removal of finished goods takes place on the basis of the removal orders transmitted from the ERP system. For the final inspection of the manufactured and palletised goods, the picked-up pallets are weighed and checked by the forklift’s iFORK in the loading area. If the goods are fault-free and approved, the consignment is checked out and verified by a final scan using a photo sensor. The data, including the image file, is reported back to the WMS and transported to the push-type loading bridge. The loading bay is specified manually upon approval of the picking order.
In addition to full-pallet picking, a picking process has also been implemented, which allows Ziegler to assemble customer-specific pallets.
For communication between the automated forklift and the iFD system, an interface to an assistance system for automated guided vehicles has been integrated. Within the system, the warehouse is defined in terms of storage zones, rows, bays, levels and locations. For navigation, the vehicle requires three-dimensional coordinates (XYZ). These are transmitted to the narrow-aisle forklift via the interface to the iFD WMS. By combining transport, routes and storage location allocation, a high degree of optimisation can be achieved here. Due to the nature of narrow-aisle forklifts, it is important to avoid frequent aisle changes, as these can only be carried out at low speed. This logic is applied by the WMS and influences the choice of storage location. To improve performance, as many double-stacks as possible are also formed.
The project was implemented over a period of 10 months, including requirements specification meetings and commissioning.
If you have any questions regarding the WMS and this project, Ms Förster will be happy to assist you.
Elisa Förster
Tel: 0371/ 53 88 0 226
