To deliver the perfect order

The picking hall infeeds under construction The warehouse under construction earlier this year.

Delivering the perfect order is the driving force behind Coca-Cola Amatil New Zealand’s new $78 million semi-automated Distribution Centre, soon to be in operation at its facility in Mt Wellington.
The Distribution Centre’s automated product handling solution was designed in conjunction with supply chain solution company, Swisslog. It comprises 1300 metres of powered conveyors; 11 storage and retrieval cranes; eight labellers and shrinkwrappers; 13 pallet elevators; five pallet transfer shuttle cars; and several voice recognition picking terminals.
These are all housed in a newly built 28,550 square metre warehouse next to the existing bottling plant.
Swisslog’s Warehouse Manager software integrates the components in a 24/7 smooth-functioning unit. Swisslog was also involved in Coca-Cola Amatil’s (CCA) first fully automated distribution centre in Melbourne, in 2003.
CCA major projects (warehousing) manager Michael Shirbin says the Melbourne and Auckland Distribution Centres put CCA firmly ahead of its fellow franchisees around the world in terms of warehousing automation.
“Customer expectations and the cost of production are going up all the time. So we had a look where we could streamline the system, implemented the automated Distribution Centre in Melbourne and will have the semi-automated version online here by the end of October. We expect to recover our Auckland capital investment within four to five years,” he says.

Centralisation and automation
The Auckland project commenced in 2006 with the building of the new warehouse.
Says Shirbin: “Consolidating the company’s growing warehousing and distribution requirements under one roof as opposed to the current decentralised system is expected to realise considerable cost, efficiency and customer service benefits for CCANZ.”
The new building has storage for 36,700 pallets and can handle a projected throughput of 31 million cases. It is divided into a primary warehouse, and a picking hall with a secondary warehouse for specialised products across from it, as well as an infeed hall on its left and staging area on its right flank.
All CCANZ’s products are manufactured in and around Auckland. The Mt Wellington factory produces more than 300 products, comprising a number of flavours in several sizes. According to Shirbin, the company despatches up to 180,000 cases of these products to consumers per day, a task of mammoth logistical proportions that will soon be even bigger.
The new distribution system kicks in once the product, already in cases on pallets and allocated a unique “licence” bar code, leaves the semi-automated bottling line and ends up on the Distribution Centre infeeds. Each pallet may contain up to 60 cases of one product and weigh between 1.2 and 1.3 tonnes.
The licence barcode contains the pallet’s information, such as flavour, size, and best-before date. Sensors along all conveyors can read both the licence and new bar codes and keep track of each pallet’s position in the Distribution Centre.

Thinking ahead
The conveyor from the production plant infeed connects with the main conveyor in a T-junction. Products manufactured off-site, also delivered in wrapped and bar coded pallets, join the main conveyor from an infeed at the shorter end of the T-junction.
The top bar of the T is an elevated conveyor, so both categories’ pallets reach it via pallet elevators. The elevated main conveyor runs the length of the primary warehouse to its top end, then turns left to run its second leg along the warehouse’s width.
Where the infeed hall’s elevated conveyor turns left, it becomes an “upper level” conveyor for the primary warehouse, which is sunk three metres into the ground and on the same level as the infeed hall. However, the conveyor is, in fact, now at ground level, as are the picking hall and staging area.
Product elevators on the corner of the top bar of the T lower incoming pallets to the identical lower “floor” level. The reason for this is to provide flexibility for future expansion, a feature evident throughout the Distribution Centre.
At the end of the second leg, the primary warehouse’s lower level conveyor ends and connects with the main conveyor through another set of pallet elevators. The ground level conveyor now turns left again to run the length of the staging area.
Nine two-lane, double-level, infeed conveyors lead off the main conveyor’s second leg into the 121 metre-long, 26 metre-high primary warehouse.
An electric crane between the lanes services each infeed. The cranes are presently set up to receive a pallet for storage from the left bottom lane and deliver a pallet for despatch to the right upper lane.
Acting on system instructions, the conveyor rolls one pallet at a time onto the moving bed on the crane’s tray. The crane moves down the crane aisle at speeds up to 14km/h. It establishes its horizontal co-ordinate with a reflecting infrared beam and its vertical co-ordinate with a tooth belt encoder. While moving it elevates the tray and its bed to the storage location as determined by the computer.
The moving bed receives wireless instructions from the system, slots its wheels into the location’s railings and carries along the pallet. When the pallet is in position, the bed retracts and rolls back to the crane tray, leaving the pallet in place.
On its way back, it picks up a pallet for despatch or the picking hall in the same manner, deposits the pallet in the upper right lane, and sends it onwards along the main conveyor.
Swedish automated warehouse expert Accalon AB manufactured all 11 cranes in the Distribution Centre. The conveyors were made in Austria by TGW. German company SSI Schaeffer designed and manufactured all racking, with both beams and uprights constructed of prime, high-strength steel.
Pallets the computer wants to store in the smaller secondary warehouse, also sunken, leave the main ground level conveyor at a junction across the fourth crane aisle. This route takes them via the left conveyor of a double-lane system, via a shuttle car, to a pallet elevator leading onto the conveyor ending in the warehouse’s two infeed conveyors.
These cranes use the same technology as those in the primary warehouse. Outbound pallets rejoin the main conveyor via the upper level and on the same route’s right lane.

Handling customer orders
Customers continuously send orders to the call centre and operators upload these into the computer system. The computer groups orders by turnaround time and customer location and communicates to the Distribution Centre how much of what product to have ready where, and when, at the staging area. It also allocates and communicates the order to a truck or railcar, giving a time and pickup location.
It then sends pallets from the storage warehouses to the staging area either directly or via the picking hall, where operators make up mixed orders.
Pallets reach the picking hall via a conveyor off the main conveyor that feeds into two separate shuttle car systems, one on either side of the pick hall. Each shuttle deposits pallets either on the 33-lane, three-pallet-deep, live pick storage, or on a nine-pallet dock from where the pallets go to manual pick racks.

‘Sarah’ reigns supreme
The computer now choreographs an intricate dance of humans interacting with machines.
The manual pick racks are divided into two columns. Each column has nine lines of storage spaces. Each line has floor space for 28 pallets plus one level of racking for the same on top of it; that is, 1110 pallet storage locations. However, pickers only pick from the 505 ground level spaces, called picking locations.
The computer instructs the forklift operator via a LED screen on the vehicle’s dashboard to move a pallet from the nine-pallet dock to the manual pick racks. The operator scans each pallet before they pick it up, and a screen instruction tells them which storage location it is destined for.
They scan the number on the location where they store the pallet, then continue with the next instruction on the screen. They also receive instructions to move a full pallet at a certain location from the upper level to the ground level to replace an empty pallet, ensuring a picker has uninterrupted access to product. Empty pallets are continually removed to a storage area.
Pickers wear headsets with a microphone through which a computer-generated voice, nicknamed ‘Sarah’, gives them instructions. Sarah directs them to a picking location at either the live or manual pick racks.
There, they read its unique number back to her. If they do so accurately, she instructs them to remove a certain number of cases from the pallet to a pallet waiting on their picking vehicles. The picker allocates this pallet a “licence” number, also supplied by Sarah.
Sarah continues with her instructions; telling the picker when to deliver a full pallet onto the picking hall infeed. The conveyor off the infeed runs the newly made-up pallet via a weighing station, where the computer measures its actual weight against its calculated expected weight.
If the weight is accurate, the conveyor sends the pallet through the shrinkwrapper and labeller, where it gets a new bar code before delivery back onto the main conveyor.
The perfect order
The main conveyor sends a pallet to one of nine outfeed stations. A railroad runs along the back of the primary warehouse, with its own outfeed station. Outfeed stations number five through nine service long distance bulk truck and rail orders. Pallets that go there automatically receive a second layer of shrinkwrap.
Following onscreen instructions, a forklift operator collects the pallet from the outfeed dock, scanning it first, and then delivering it to a marked floor location, which they also scan.
A truck parks under the main loading canopy area in a previously designated pick-up location. A forklift operator, again following onscreen orders, loads the pallets from the floor location onto the truck, keeping the computer informed of the whereabouts of a pallet by scanning each pallet as well as the floor location.
Once the operator declares the order filled, the computer prints the customer invoices for the driver to collect in the despatch office situated at the canopy’s far end. A similar process governs railcar pick-ups…and off goes the product shipments, taking Coke and “adding life” to a waiting world.
Shirbin says the Distribution Centre computer applies algorithms to optimise the economic movement of pallets.
“The idea is to have a 24-hour turnaround on orders, and to deliver the perfect order – exactly what the customer wants, when they want it. The Melbourne automated Distribution Centre is operating very well and I am confident that the Auckland one will too,” he says.