Calling all grocers: Knapp argues automation is ideal for grocery applications

Constant market changes, new products and promotions pose a huge challenge for the grocery distribution network. As well as large-volume deliveries to branch stores, there are deliveries to petrol stations and e-commerce or m-commerce customers to consider. The shifting sands in the supermarket sector make planning of order structures and the logistics response increasingly difficult.

Traditional thinking has it that automation cannot provide the flexibility required in grocery distribution. While over-automation of any application is – by definition – wrong, significant elements of supermarket warehouses have been automated highly successfully, cutting costs and improving lead-times. This automation can involve the picking of full trays or cartons of product, picking of individual items from trays or cartons, or picking of units from pallets.

Full-case picking

When picking at full case level, pallets of trays arriving at the warehouse are depalletised automatically and conveyed to an automated store, from where they can be retrieved when required and automatically repalletised. This is the solution supplied by Knapp recently to the leading Swiss supermarket chain, Migros, at its distribution facility in Zurich. Here food arrives in containers stacked on pallets. After being depalletised fully automatically, they are stored in an OSR Shuttle system that acts as a storage and picking buffer. When goods are required for store orders, whole trays are retrieved and repalletised with other goods required by the store.

Picking from trays

In the second scenario – picking of individual items from trays – incoming goods are first depalletised, either fully automatically or semi-automatically, and then placed in the automated store. They are later retrieved and sent to a goods-to-person workstation, where the required goods are picked. Picking can either be into totes that will later be palletised or placed in roll containers or – using Knapp’s Pick-it-Easy Tray solution – picked goods can be placed directly onto a pallet or into a roll container.

As well as being efficient, Pick-it-Easy Tray is designed with ergonomics very much in mind – the workstation minimises strenuous tasks through automatic height adjustment of the source container and roll container or pallet, as well as through the use of sliding rather than lifting of goods. A touch-screen shows operators which goods to pick and in which position in the roll cage or on the pallet to place them for optimum load formation. Completed pallets or roll containers can also be transported away from the workstation to dispatch fully automatically, using Knapp’s KiSoft Automove automated guided vehicles (AGVs). This solution has been implemented successfully for the grocery giant, SPAR, at its distribution centre in St Pölten in Austria; the Slovenian grocery chain, TUS, at its warehouse in Celje; and the Co-op chain in Sweden.

Picking from pallets

Thirdly, there is the picking of goods directly from pallets. This has traditionally been very difficult to automate but Knapp has developed a brand-new solution in co-operation with SPAR for use at its new distribution centre just outside Vienna, which will go live next year. The solution – Pick-it-Easy Move – enables ergonomic and efficient picking of fast-moving products directly from pallets using the goods-to-person method. Pallets of goods of one type are delivered by a conveyor system to a moving shuttle with integral operator platform. This shuttle moves automatically between a dozen target locations – six on each side – featuring roll containers on lifts.

Required goods are picked from the pallet according to instructions given on a computer screen in front of the operator, with cartons being simply pulled and pushed from the pallet to the roll container – with both the pallet and the roll container being automatically adjusted for height, there is no need for lifting at all. Pick-it-Easy Move also indicates exactly where each picked item should be placed for optimum space utilisation. The remaining goods on the pallet can be passed to the next Pick-it-Easy Move module for picking by another employee or returned to storage. The solution is designed to ensure shop-friendly picking – for example heavy goods are typically picked first so that they are at the bottom of the roll containers and items can be delivered to stores in shelf-ready order. Up to 600 cartons per hour can be picked from pallets by each Pick-it-Easy Move module.

These are just a few of a number of simple, efficient and ergonomic automation solutions for grocery applications that are largely being overlooked in the UK. It is time for food retailers to grasp the nettle of automation and reap the rewards.