Quick turnaround

Witron worked to a tight time schedule. Its refurbishment experts had four months to modernise the outdated replenishment warehouse - a system with 12,800 pallet locations that was originally designed and implemented by a competitor 24 years ago.

After working on the design, time scheduling, and emergency concept design, the Witron team replaced the seven stacker cranes. These were replaced by six new 82 foot tall Dambach devices with pivoting shuttle fork. The seventh aisle of the warehouse with a length of 394 feet remained clear to enable better accessibility to the system for future maintenance tasks and to allow Kroger a path around the automated system. The new stacker cranes were integrated into the existing rack supported high bay warehouse and are able to transport any North American GMA pallet without additional system pallets while having a high inbound / outbound throughput of 46 single cycles (inbound / outbound) per stacker crane. The original front-zone inbound / outbound conveyor system was exchanged and replaced by technology from Binder.  

The existing customer’s S5 controls were replaced by S7 control technology. A new Witron material flow computer (MFC) will now coordinate all conveyor system movements. Moreover, Kroger decided in favor of a Witron WMS solution to manage the high bay operation instead of the previously used warehouse management system from a US provider. In addition to the assembling and dismounting tasks, Witron - as general contractor - coordinated all necessary work steps with suppliers and customers.

 

"Even though the existing logistics center wasn't originally implemented by Witron, we were able to rapidly become acquainted with all work details based on our extensive refurbishment know how", according to Brian Sherman. "This was essential in order to meet the tight timeline". 

The Layton warehouse supplies several hundred Kroger stores. Therefore, it was extremely important to maintain smooth operation during refurbishment efforts. Based on this, components were replaced step by step. The key was the mechanical de-installation and new installation of the stacker cranes in pairs, including the corresponding inbound / outbound conveyor system - and the parallel start-up of the PLC and the MFC with subsequent go-live.