DISTRIBUTION CENTER FOR THE FURNITURE TRADE, GERMANY

Optimization of order fulfillment for multinational furniture group

An intense price war is raging in the furniture trade. It is therefore important to constantly adapt cost structures and processes, including in logistics, to the dynamic market situation in order to be able to offer customers an attractive, competitive range of goods.

New fulfillment approaches required

The Flat Pack Picking solution was developed as a result of an initiative by the SSI Schaefer specialists in the "Retail & Wholesale" division in cooperation with a multinational furniture group.

Challenges

Continuous increases in efficiency with a parallel increase in throughput

Relieving employees of manual tasks

Heterogeneous range of items and large proportion of heavy and bulky items

Fully automated and secure handling of a large number of SKUs

Intelligent and efficient robotics solution

On the way to a more ergonomic and healthier working environment for its employees, a multinational furniture company has successfully implemented a fully automated picking system for handling large and heavy items at its customer order distribution center in Dortmund. The heart of the system is the flat pack picking solution with intelligent gantry robot picking from SSI Schaefer. The ready-to-use, scalable system, which is designed for high throughput, is flexible in handling, is suitable for a large number of heavy, large items and automatically generates optimum packing patterns for the order pallets. Modern robotic applications take the strain off the workforce when handling these goods.