For more than 10 years the Zbyszko Company specializes in production of fruit and vegetable beverages, being one of the five largest producers of beverages in Poland. The company’s strategy puts emphasis on the development of trade relationships, innovations and the investments in an industrial and IT infrastructure. The recent key investments were made in the construction of a modern manufacturing plant and a finished products warehouse in Radom (the company’s first production plant is situated in nearby Bialobrzegi).
In the new manufacturing plant a modern production line by KHS was installed – this allowed to increase production output to one million two hundred liters a month. Such a huge amount of products goes from production to the finished products warehouse, which is able to house up to 8,000 pallets. In order to efficiently manage the warehouse, it was decided to implement the WMS system offered by Consafe Logistics. Consafe Logistics also delivered the wireless LAN system and radio terminals.
Requirements to the system
The most important aim of the Warehouse Management System implementation was achieving more control over goods stored in the warehouse, eliminating mistakes when loading goods, as well as raising of work efficiency. „The main reason for choosing the WMS from Consafe Logistics was the system’s fine reputation, ability to co-operate with any ERP system and its flexibility, allowing easy extension of the system in the future" , explains Dominik Ostatek, the plant’s Deputy Manager, responsible for the system implementation.
Thanks to a thorough pre-implementation analysis, the system was ready for work right away after its implementation. The implementation took less than two months and proceeded with no major disruptions. Small adjustments in the system’s functionality, introduced later, were addressed by warehouse managers themselves, and resulted from the practical knowledge of the warehouse processes nature.
How does it work at Zbyszko?
The WMS was integrated with the CDN XL Business Management System used by Zbyszko. Special attention was paid to smooth online communication between the systems, without necessity to use file interfaces.
In order to raise work efficiency in the finished products warehouse, Consafe Logistics implemented the Spectrum 24 wireless LAN using radio terminals with touch screens mounted on forklifts. This gives the warehouse employees direct access to all the data from any place within the warehouse premises. The ERP system sends commands directly to a terminal’s screen, and a warehouse employee enters information using a touch screen or a barcode reader. This eliminates the problems of synchronization and consistency of distributed databases and allows many warehouse attendants to work simultaneously with the same document. All data are entered in real time into a central database with no concern about making a mistake. What’s more, these are precise data that do not require re-verification.
Finished products are automatically arranged on pallets. Then, logistic labels with the SSCC code for pallets are printed using a printer supplied by the Ewa-Bis company. Printing a label results in simultaneous recording a palette by the WMS, what is equivalent to putting it on the warehouse inventory. Before the products are ready for dispatching they have to go through quality control. Such labeled palettes are inserted into gravity racks. Only quality certified products can be sent to a loading platform.
After registration and activation of a loading order in the CDN XL system, the order to hand goods over to a given loading platform appears in a forklift operator’s radio terminal. A forklift operator comes up to a rack with given products, scans the SSCC code from a pallet, the system checks whether it is a right article and a palette went through quality control. If so, a forklift operator delivers a palette to an appointed ramp. Confirmation of delivery is made by reading a ramp barcode.
Movement of every palette is registered in a database. Basing on these information it is possible to trace when a specific palette was produced, and when - and to which customer - it was handed over. This cycle is repeated until loading is finished by a forklift operator. The system takes care so as a warehouse employee completing an order moves around the warehouse through a shortest route. If there are no goods at the indicated location, the system proposes an alternative storage place.
"Thanks to the WMS implementation, the process of receipt goods from production, quality control and delivery to a ramp was improved”, says Dominik Ostatek from Zbyszko. “The time of warehouse operations was reduced, and a stocktaking does not require employing extra workers or temporary closing the warehouse – this can be performed, so to say, in the background. Certainly, we have less bureaucracy - data are entered automatically. For the moment, it’s hard to say about return on investment in the financial sense – these are mainly time savings. However, as you know, time is money”.
Read more at
www.zbyszko.com.pl
2005