Smart warehousing system for the optimization in winery logistics
Spain, Castile and León
IoT Digital Innovation Hub
Experiment objective
The main objective of this experience is to optimize the storage of both the stocking and unstacking in the warehouse of the winery to follow a control and order of all available products and to facilitate their handling and transfer. All this taking into account the current Pago traceability and order management system to optimize not only the storage of the products but also the way of palletizing and packaging, always taking into account the improvement in production speed, the reduction of work of the warehouse
Challenges
- Challenge 1: To optimize the layout of products within the warehouse to maximize storage capacity in the space allocated, using predefined heuristics, and thus reduce the movements required by operators and machinery when pallets are being formed.
- Challenge 2: To reduce the time spent on these pre-delivery tasks, including unstuffing, pallet preparation, strapping and loading, increasing warehouse efficiency and warehouse productivity, and reducing the time it takes to ship a shipment for greater end-customer satisfaction.
- Challenge 3: To create an interface for the warehousing process that respects ergonomics in the work environment, as well as a process that does not lengthen pallet conformation times.
Implementation Solution
Results Obtained
The solution has two parts, the first part of the algorithm concerns the picking of products. Once a new order arrives, the algorithm knows the exact position of each product in the warehouse, the current pick pallet location and the characteristics of the order. It then uses network theory to obtain the shortest path to pick all the products.
The second part is the storage of the products. If the user needs to store some products in the warehouse, the algorithm estimates the best position taking into account the future sales forecast thanks to heuristics that determine which products are sold more or which are sold together.
To verify that the proposal made for the optimization of the warehouse is sufficiently accurate and adapted to the reality that occurs in the warehouse, a series of experiments have been carried out, which have given the following results.
- One of the main objectives of this experiment was to optimize the storage in the warehouse warehouses to keep control of all the available products and facilitate their handling, it has been achieved almost the expected goal of 25%.
- Storage times have been reduced by up to 30% in the best storage cases.
- Finally, it was also possible to improve the efficiency of the shipping process, a more efficient management of the products, energy savings and more environmentally friendly processes.
Impact of the experiment
This experiment has reduced production costs and increased profits by increasing competitiveness with other companies in the sector. This cost reduction has been possible thanks to the fuel savings of the pallet trucks, which now have to make fewer trips; to the reduction of packaging materials, since by lowering the right amount of product there is less waste; and the time savings experienced by the operators, making the time of their working day profitable.
This experiment and its algorithm could be applied to other industries with a warehouse, since the warehouse structure with which the algorithm works is completely modular.
Dissemination
https://twitter.com/TheAirInstitute/status/1349658802291937281?s=20
https://twitter.com/TheAirInstitute/status/1360182178441801730?s=20
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6765950392288198656/
https://air-institute.org/blog/2021/02/12/iiot-and-artificial-intelligence-smart-winery-environments
Information source: dihworld.eu
Project:
Enterprises:
Dihworld
Sector
Digital, Manufacturing.
Keywords
Digital technologies
