Lights-Out Bakery Order Fulfillment

The bakery industry is constantly facing new challenges. The retail business is consolidating, competition is getting tougher, and product delivery times are getting shorter. In addition, demands on the accuracy and traceability of deliveries are increasing. The traditional distribution center methods may form a bottleneck to increased production.Cimcorp has developed an innovative automated solution for bakery order fulfillment.

Cimcorp’s MultiPick solution combines buffer storage and order picking operations in one gantry robot-based automated system, supervised by Cimcorp’s WCS control system. The handling system can manage the complete material flow, from the production lines to the loading docks.

Bakery products can be delivered to customers as full crates, mixed crates or whole pallets. The handling system can manage all types of customer orders, with slow-movers (single items) being picked manually using pick-by-light and fast-movers (full crates, or even whole stacks or whole pallets, of the same product) being picked fully automatically.

The buffer storage between production and order picking and the fast-mover picking operations are performed by one or more MultiPickrobots. Fresh bakery goods are stored in stacks of crates – with each stack comprising only one product type – in the buffer storage area and are immediately available for picking. Orders are picked by the MultiPick robots, which can pick any number of crates from a stack at a time. The orders are picked in the correct order for the dispatch schedule and are loaded into delivery vehicles in the optimal drop sequence.

The benefits

Automation of order picking, buffer storage and handling operations results in a number of key benefits:

·         Reduction in labor costs and worker compensation claims – The MultiPick performs the heavy, repetitive tasks of moving crates of bread.

·         Greater picking capacity– robotic picking is fast and efficient, increasing overall picking capacity and lowering handling costs.

·         Improved control– with all picking (both manual and automatic) and handling (whole crate stacks and pallets) operations controlled by Cimcorp’s WCS control system, there is better overall control of the logistics, resulting in less product waste and improved traceability.

·         Higher levels of accuracy– the use of paperless pick-by-light technology for manual picking and automated robotic picking results in 100% picking accuracy.

·         Easier cleaning– the MultiPick® robots can automatically empty the entire picking area in order to facilitate cleaning of the floor, an essential requirement in the food industry.

Source: Cimcorp