World Trade - April 2009 - (Page 31) OpsMan Screen displayed in manager’s office. How Sky-Trax works Products enter the return center on full pallets and move to a scanning station, where every item is scanned and entered into the facility’s WMS. A conveyor system moves products, which are then disposed according to the customer’s requirements. Some move either to trash or to salvage, others back to the vendor. “The important piece is that everything gets put back into a pallet quantity at the end of the conveyor line,” Cameron explains. Pallets move to a stretch-wrap machine. This is the first touchpoint for the Sky-Trax system, which interfaces easily into the facility’s WMS, Cameron reports. “The optical camera interfaces just like a barcode scanner would.” Pallets receive pallet ID numbers. As the forklift driver approaches the stretch-wrapped pallet, a camera mounted on the front of the vehicle reads the pallet number. A second camera resides on the top of the forklift that reads location position markers placed in the facility’s ceiling. So the system, using the two cameras, reads the pallet ID number and sends data into the WMS to inform what pallet was picked up where, explains Cameron. “And the camera on top of the forklift tells me where the forklift is and at which wrap station it is picking up the pallet.” To pinpoint location throughout the warehouse, Sky-Trax installed a non-active series of ceiling locator placards with barcode-like information that the camera residing on top of the forklift reads. “The camera on top of the forklift is for tracking purposes and inventory management,” explains Sky-Trax’s Mahan. Throughout this process, the driver has not had to touch the screen or do anything other than drive the forklift truck. “As the driver operates the truck, the computer screen mounted on the forklift tells the driver The facility was moving only 15 pallets an hour prior to the installation. It’s now up to 30-plus. where to go to pick up the pallet and where to put that pallet away,” Cameron says. “The location the system recommends has a lot of logic built into it. For instance, we took into consideration the travel time vertically and horizontally and did some algorithms to find the closest put-away location in the warehouse based on that vertical and horizontal calculation.” Once the driver drops off the pallet into the racking system, he starts the process all over again. So this technology is totally handsfree for drivers, opposed to RF technology that required them to do all of the data entry themselves throughout the pick-up and putaway functions. Once the facility receives client authorization to pick a pallet from the storage racking, the process is repeated in reverse. “Because the driver knows what pallet is on his forklift, he is actually confirming that he went through the right dock door as he loads the shipment into the trailer, thereby verifying the shipment,” Cameron says. “This gives me another accuracy gain, eliminating the possibility of misloading a pallet or leaving a pallet behind.” The benefits Although the biggest benefits are increased productivity and accuracy, Cameron notes there are ancillary benefits hidden behind the data. “It’s all about utilization data and the fact that I now have full visibility of my forklifts by tracking them on a coordinate system. I can also see how much time operators are driving with and without product and how many miles per day they are actually driving. Knowing that utilization, I can really understand the data and work on decreasing that travel time and increasing my productivity even further.” The system has also reduced the time it takes to train WWW.WORLDTRADEMAG.COM 31 http://WWW.WORLDTRADEMAG.COM
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