Beverage World - May 2008 - (Page 54) [SUPPLYCHAIN] RACK SYSTEMS BEVSOLUTIONS Space Savers Up to your ears in SKUs? This is one problem when ‘just shelving’ it actually works. By Carol Casper A lthough the practice of floor-stacking is still prevarecent large beverage warehouse projects. lent in the beverage industry, especially among When it comes to racking, no one’s buying “off the rack” smaller bottlers and wholesalers, it appears the day these days. There are a lot of choices in terms of equipment of unracked, mainly floor-stacked beverage distriand configurations, and designs can and should be highly bution centers is drawing to a close. specific to the particulars of each operation. SKU proliferation leads a list of factors driving this trend. “Old-fashioned drive-in rack is mostly going by the way“A lot of beer distributors are side,” adds Coleman. “Now being forced to improve their you’re seeing more ‘cart’ or space utilization, because they’re push-back rack and pallet flow.” taking on more products that With high volume items, particwould have been unheard of 15 ularly when date coding is an or 20 years ago, like bottled issue, pallet flow-through racks waters, soft drinks, wine, and in that can go four and five deep some cases, even liquor,” obor more are a popular solution. serves John Chauncey, director For companies taking on larger of food and beverage division numbers of slower-moving prodfor Boston Rack, a USA-based ucts, a carton flow-through rack integrator of storage systems is another option, notes Alex specializing in the beverage Huitron, the national sales engiindustry. “Now they’re faced neer of food and beverage for with the problem of how to fit Boston Rack. “In a space where all these products into their you would typically have two buildings, and do it efficiently.” pallets on the floor and maybe It’s not just a matter of two at the first beam level, for a accommodating more pallets total of four SKUs, you can FOR SOME CASE PICK OPERATIONS, traditional single-deep selective rack and cases and more SKUs, but replace that with a carton flow works fine. In this case, workers select from pallets at floor level while also managing the challenges to reserve stock is stored immediately above each pick face. rack that is loaded from the picking efficiency that accompany back, using four beam levels more diversified product lines, where different products and about seven rows across, for a total of 28 SKUs,” he says. require different pick systems and storage arrangements. Although the system means added labor on the front end Consolidation, especially among smaller beer wholesalers, to break pallets and stock lanes, with slower movers that is adding to the trend, notes Richard Hallal, Logistics don’t have to be restocked very often, the extra positions Development Corp. (Cleveland, Ohio, USA). gained can be a very positive trade-off. “Even smaller distributors are finding they need to impleFor companies that need to handle combinations of fullment some form of stock locator system,” he points out. pallet and case pick orders, one neat approach is multi-deep Changes in packaging also are a factor. Many of the newer racks crisscrossed by pick tunnels that enable operators to SKUs that companies are adding today, along with many tradi- retrieve product with a pallet jack. This approach can be used tional brands and lines, now come in lightweight plastic conin a variety of situations, including areas with deep drive-in tainers. Plastics are great in terms of breakage, but not for racking, flow-through or equipped with an automated storstacking, notes Frank Coleman Jr. of Pinnacle Consulting age/retrieval (AS/RS) system in which case the automated Group (Snohomish, Wash., USA), principal-in-charge of several cranes could be used to pull full pallets to fill orders, as well » BEVERAGEWORLD.COM 54_BEVERAGE WORLD_MAY 2008 http://BEVERAGEWORLD.COM
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