By Derek Rickard, Director of Sales, Cimcorp
Everybody along the fresh food supply chain works towards a typical objective: offer safe, high-quality items to customers. However time is of the essence when moving disposable products. One make-or-break point in the supply chain? The storage facility or warehouse.
Within these centers, quick and effective satisfaction operations straight equate into a trusted supply of fresh food on shop racks. On the other hand, ineffectiveness results in purchase hold-ups, crappy items, and dissatisfied clients. So to much better handle storage facility operations, more fresh food business and suppliers are buying automation.
Making the most of automation
Set up within the circulation end of fresh food production websites or in climate-controlled storage centers, robotic options can enhance and manage order satisfaction procedures- whatever from products getting, storage, and buffering, to selecting, palletizing, packing, and dispatch. Facilities that automate, instead of entirely counting on manual item handling, end up being as much as 6 times more effective and acquire huge benefits.
Let’s take a look at 3 of the leading advantages, in addition to examples of leading food business getting automation right:
Optimum item freshness
Storage facilities and warehouse that deal with fresh items need to fulfill extremely brief preparation to lessen putridity and optimize life span. After all, the less time items invest in the storage facility, the quicker they’re offered to clients.
Today’s automated options are created to fulfill the requirement for speed. Storage and order selecting functions can be incorporated into a single system, making it possible for fast, end-to-end item dealing with for those tight preparation. Disposable products with stringent sell-by dates then reach shops as quick as possible, and clients get their cash’s worth when purchasing fresh food.
One excellent example originates from grocery huge Kroger and its Mountain View Foods milk processing plant in Denver, Colorado. When developing the plant, Kroger executed an end-to-end automatic storage facility service to exactly manage the whole product circulation of the center. Now Kroger has the ability to quickly disperse its packaged milk, cream, and juice items to more than 160 shops- guaranteeing longer life span, optimum freshness, and pleased clients.
Versatility to fulfill need
Need changes are a given up fresh food circulation. Some are foreseeable to a degree, like the seasonal rises numerous centers see throughout the summer season and holiday. Others are almost difficult to expect, making it much harder to adjust. Simply recall at the start of COVID-19. Stressed buyers left many supermarket racks empty, as warehouse worked relentlessly to stay up to date with increased need for necessary products.
Modular automated systems can assist fresh food centers get ready for the anticipated and the unanticipated. These systems use pre-engineered cells of automation that are standardized and quickly repeatable. Facilities can rapidly and quickly scale up their levels of automation as required to fulfill modifications in need, without interfering with continuous operations.
Think about how one Midwest corner store chain enhanced rise capability through automation. In 2018, Kwik Journey opened a modern baking center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, to enhance production volumes of its popular fresh bread and buns. The business purchased automation for effective and well-orchestrated item circulation throughout the center. As quickly as products are baked and packaged, they go into an automatic storage and retrieval system (AS/RS). Then they are chosen and dispatched to shops according to a first-in-first-out (FIFO) stock management design.
At the break out of the pandemic, Kwik Journey saw need for its fresh-baked items almost triple in a single week. However geared up with versatile automation, Kwik Journey quickly preserved its normal high levels of order speed, precision, and freshness- in spite of the unanticipated disturbance.
Optimum labor use
Labor lacks prevail almost all over, and storage facilities and warehouse are no exception. Lots of in the food market are having a hard time to hire and keep adequate personnel to keep operations running efficiently. These lacks put one of the most pressure on centers where workers need to by hand move items in and out of storage and choice and prepare all orders by hand.
Rather, automation can take control of the labor-intensive jobs associated with order satisfaction. They can run around the clock with very little human participation to fill any existing spaces in the labor force and optimize efficiency.
In turn, human workers can move far from physically requiring functions and handle much safer, more interesting positions in the storage facility. This might consist of monitoring automatic devices, picking selecting series, transportation preparation, and system upkeep. In general, workers will gain from much better working conditions and business will discover brand-new cost savings through decreased labor expenses and increased efficiency.
Martin’s Famous Pastry Shoppe, Inc. ®- a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania-based food producer understood for its potato bread and rolls- understood these advantages firsthand. After battling with seasonal staffing throughout hectic summer season peaks, the pastry shop chose to automate order satisfaction in its head offices’ storage facility. Martin’s Famous Pastry Shoppe, Inc. ® executed an automatic system that shops, procedures, and satisfies orders with little human intervention, lowering its labor requirements and guy hours by 30%. And by moving workers far from labor-intensive positions, the pastry shop has
got rid of the security threats that occur with manual order satisfaction.
Winning the race versus the clock
In spite of the clear advantages of automating, some fresh food business might be reluctant to make the financial investment. After all, what takes place if their requirements alter down the roadway and their system is not able to accommodate the modifications? Thankfully, automation does not need to be an all-or-nothing option.
Versatile, modular automatic options can be quickly included into brand-new buildings or existing center footprints. And while automation can deal with the whole order satisfaction procedure, business can likewise automate locations of the storage facility that will offer the most benefit and the greatest ROI. These “islands of automation” can be incorporated with manual operations, and scaled if required, so operations can perform at their finest no matter what the future brings.
Whatever approach you select, automated options can provide you the speed you require. Fresh food circulation is a race versus the clock, and it’s time to get ahead of the video game.
As Director of Sales at Cimcorp, Derek Rickard leads the sales group in establishing robotic order satisfaction options to fulfill each client’s warehousing requirements. With 20+ years of supply chain experience, Rickard has actually dealt with a number of the very first totally automated robotic selecting systems in The United States and Canada.
