Baking&Snack - July 2013 - 95

OPERATIONS
Warehouse Management

Warehouse management systems go beyond streamlining staging and order filling.
Automation in this area can benefit the whole bakery operation.

W

by Charlotte Atchley

Warehouse management systems automate, organize
and track a bakery’s warehouse and shipping, ensuring
the right products get delivered to the right customers.
But their effects are not limited to the warehouse and
loading docks. Principles and information from the
warehouse can trickle upstream to improve production
efficiency and reduce changeovers, labor and costs.
Information is power, and the information bakers
gain from warehouse management systems can cause a
ripple effect that reaches all the way to ingredient handling. With a warehouse management system, bakers
learn exactly how much they are producing in real time.
“That’s missing today because in the paper world that
exists in many bakeries, they don’t get that information
in real time,” said Marc Braun, president, US operations,
Pcdata, East Granby, CT. “If production uses that information, it can reduce the amount of changeovers. It
should be able to reduce the amount of ingredients that
are used.”
However, most of the baking industry has been slow
to automate its warehouse and distribution area while
continuing to automate other parts of their operations.
When bakers look to invest, they focus first on the bakery production lines, the apple of their eyes. “For the
last 50 years, their focus was on production, production, production. How can we streamline and optimize
www.bakingandsnack.com

Using a warehouse
management system in
a freezer enables longer
production runs, making
bakeries more efficient.
Workhorse Automation

production?” said Ralf Ulmer, executive vice-president,
sales, ToolBox Software North America, Inc., St. Paul,
MN. “If you walk around and look in the bakeries, production has a very high level of automation. Then you go
through the door into the warehouse and shipping, and
nothing has changed in the last 50 years.”
This seems to be shifting, though, as production, ingredient and labor costs go up and companies look for
ways to save money. They then turn toward the warehouse, the part of the bakery that hasn’t changed in the
past 50 to 100 years. What they find is that accurate orders and automated inventory tracking can have a substantial benefit beyond the warehouse and loading dock.

Getting immediate feedback
Bakeries still using paper trails to track inventory and fill
orders have an interesting dilemma: They aren’t sure exactly how many units of finished product they are producing. “Automating the warehousing gives a very accurate inventory of a bakery’s products, so it allows them
to schedule shipments based on this accurate inventory
versus a manual system, which is not always the most
precise in bakeries,” said Kenneth Mentch, Workhorse
Automation, Oxford, PA.
Bakers often know how many batches they produce
each day, and from that information, they know how

July 2013 / Baking & Snack / 95


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Baking&Snack - July 2013

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