Mezzanine and assembly line for Omnicore company

The complexity of the project consisted in taking into account the specifics of the Customer’s activity. The international company Omnicore supports the full cycle of sales of goods of many multi-brand fashion retailers in omnichannel supply chains, such as: New Balance, Puma, Noblesse, MD Fashion, VSI. His own. This means that its distribution warehouse handles a huge amount of goods. And therefore, without building a convenient and competent order picking system based on the Goods-To-Person principle, when the product arrives at the person instead of the operator walking down the alley in search of it, it is impossible to increase productivity.

After carefully prescribed algorithmization of the full cycle from receiving goods to shipment, it was proposed to ensure simultaneous processing of flows in different directions. Some of the goods upon arrival will go to storage, the rest will be immediately transferred to the packaging area for shipment (passes through the cross-dock). That is, an end-to-end process is proposed, in which the flows of goods diverge and converge without stopping. The complexity of the project was added by the fact that the processes of receiving and shipping products at the Customer’s warehouse were not to be interrupted in any case.
The implementation of such an ambitious decision consisted in the following steps.

Installation of a mezzanine and several conveyors at once: belt, belt zone, roller zone conveyor and gravity roller conveyor. Thanks to them, we can separate the flow of goods by different zones and completely remove the need for operators to pass through the warehouse. Each operator in the receiving area has an ergonomic workplace at the table, where he quickly receives the goods and sends them to the appropriate direction. After the receiving area, the goods reach the storage area – on the first and second floors – thanks to the belt conveyor.

The storage area is represented by a mezzanine. For continuous operation of the warehouse, from the place where the mezzanine structure was supposed to be installed, dismantle the old racks and at the same time work on the installation of new ones. Currently, the storage area represented by a mezzanine has a total floor area of ​​798 square meters, and a shelf storage area of ​​1,700 square meters. sq. On each floor of the mezzanine there are 4 levels of shelf storage, with a load per shelf of up to 400 kg. The arrival of goods to the mezzanine replenishes the cells of the storage area, the disposal of goods also takes place via a zone belt conveyor to the lower floor, the speed of the line is 0.5 m/s.

All goods arrive at the cross-dock packing zone from two zones: in plastic boxes from the reception zone – thanks to a roller zone conveyor, from the storage zone – by a belt zone conveyor. Due to its design characteristics, it provides the opportunity to buffer the goods on the way to the packaging area. The speed of the conveyor is 1400 boxes per hour.

The combination of the conveyor and the mezzanine made it possible to eliminate the need for the operation of loading and unloading equipment and to increase the use of the useful volume of the warehouse space. From now on, just the conveyor belt and mezzanine, no forklifts.

The task has been solved – the end-to-end process has been organized, the flow of incoming and outgoing goods has been separated by direction, the processing of orders has been accelerated, and the use of the useful volume of the warehouse has been increased.

The customer got the desired result, we added an interesting case to our portfolio. Pure win-win. Let’s stay effective by working together!