Background
The company produces metal components, all very similar to each other (and therefore also easily confuseable).
These components are then placed on pallets, which in turn are arranged in a large outdoor area. Each pallet is labeled.
When it's time to send the pallets to the end customer, a heavy vehicle enters the loading area and the warehouse workers load the
material with one or more forklifts.
Challenge
Weeks can pass between storage and shipment to the customer, and often the pallets, during this period of time,
are moved, even just a few meters, without keeping track of the movement.
The customer's need was above all to speed up the identification of the pallets and consequently reduce the loading time on the heavy vehicle.
Secondly, with the increase in production, the allocation space was less and less and this made necessary to move the pallets frequently to
optimize the scarce spaces available.
Finally, it is not possible to read the label from the forklift, so each vehicle was "accompanied" by a warehouseman on foot who checked that
the correct pallet was picked up.
In this context, the loading times available are limited, because there is a continuous flow of heavy vehicles. Often, however, identifying a
pallet can take several minutes as you have to look for the right pallet among dozens of similar ones, most of the time not close to each other.
All these delays have repercussions on the loading times of the heavy vehicle, with the result that the following vehicle is often forced to wait
outside the factory, leading in extreme cases to create road traffic problems.
Solution
Our partner Bit Tonic has developed a platform, integrated with the customer's management system, based on an equivalent platform to AccuRTLS, able to associate a BlueUp tag Forte+ Quuppa to each pallet. The forklift has been equipped with a tablet and the driver, thanks to a plan of the storage area, can monitor, in real time, the position of the pallets he has to load onto the heavy vehicles. Since the pallet is shipped together with the finished product, the tag has been encapsulated in a magnetic container, via 3D printing, so that it can be applied and retrieved quickly. Thanks to the flexibility of the Bluetooth LE technology, accessory services have been created such as verifying that the tag has actually been removed through a specific scan at the exit gate of heavy vehicles and a rapid tag disassociation software, which allows to move hundreds of tags daily without wasting time.
Results
The customer brought the delays to zero and was able to not only increase the amount of orders they could fulfill daily, but also canceled the need to expand storage area.
Related content
