AUTOMATED WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT & CONTROL SYSTEM HANDLES 11-12 MILLION ITEMS ANNUALLY, WITH ONLY 2 0R 3 OPERATORS PER SHIFT
IDC has provided an automated warehouse management and control system for a 9,500sq metre garment handling distribution centre owned and operated by Gruppo Coin in Rome, Italy. The system employs 330 of IDC’s intelligent bar code readers, PLCs and a central server in a package that handles 11 – 12 million garments annually, yet requires only two or three operators per shift, even at peak turnover times with over 300,00 garments being handled over a two shift period.
“The new system gives us total space utilisation combined with ease of handling, real-time control and high operational flexibility with minimum manpower requirements,” says Mr.Agostino Menichino,Warehouse Manager at Gruppo Coin in Rome. With more than 400 shops located mainly in Italy, but also in Switzerland. Gruppo Coin is one of the leading European companies in large-scale garment distribution. Retailing through its Coin, Oviesse and Act stores, Gruppo Coin’s annual turnover in 2003 amounted to 120 million units, of which 27 million units were hanging garments and the rest flat goods.
To meet the growing demand for its products, Gruppo Coin has awarded six major contracts for new distribution centres over the last twenty years. All of these have been won by Moving ITS Systems, an international specialist in all aspects of product handling, transportation, sortation, picking and storage. In the latest project, Moving ITS selected IDC as its partner to provide the automation element of the ITS Warehouse Management and Control System.
The WMCS system is based around an overhead conveyor system supplied by Moving ITS, which provides the speed, flexibility and versatility to move trolleys freely and silently around the four-floor, 9,500m2 warehouse. The Trolley Guidance Supervisory Control System is based upon IDC’s intelligent bar code readers. These units are fitted at trolley divert points to control the route of each trolley.
The IBRs recognise and react to each of the 13,000 trolleys in the warehouse, communicating data and instructions via a gateway PLC to the IDC –supplied- and- programmed, RAID Level 5 Server, running a Windows NT software platform. This communicates to the Gruppo Coin Warehouse Management System via a TCP/IP network, enabling route selection of each trolley to be designated and the monitoring of goods in real time. To ensure response times for messaging between the WMS, WCS and the plc network is independent of server database size, an Oracle 8 relational database software is employed
In addition to its role in passing routing instructions to the IBRs and confirming trolley arrivals, IDC’s server also controls the flow of empty trolleys to ensure that they are returned to a buffer; and provides an operator interface (MMI) and diagnostic tool for such occurrences as trolley jams.
Manual input by operators into the Gruppo Coin system is minimal: on arrival, goods are identified by means of a portable RF unit, while still on their motorised intake telescopes. At this point the system takes over and guides the trolley to the appropriate storage location. This location is chosen autonomously by the IDC system on the basis of pre-programmed criteria.
When dispatching goods, the system generates instructions to the operator to push the train of trolleys contained on a storage line onto the moving line. Again, the system takes over at this point and will guide trolleys, originating from whatever part of the warehouse, to the dispatch area, where they are automatically compacted by customer and grouped by geographical destination.
Normally, with a logistical system of this type, working on four levels, the complexity of the control system, especially in terms of cabling and software, would be considerable. However, IDC has overcome this problem with a unique system employing four IBR networks communicating, via low cost fibre optic links, to 330 distributed IBRs on the four floors. Each IBR has its own integral microprocessor, communications, and local inputs and outputs to detect switch states and control solenoids to divert trolleys around the system.
When a trolley approaches a junction the presence detector in the IBR senses it and switches on the barcode laser scanner and reads the trolley barcode. The onboard microprocessor then checks the barcode against the route look-up table of barcode numbers already downloaded over the communications link from the central PLC. If the trolley requires diverting, the IBR relay output energises the divert solenoid to transfer the trolley to the next section of overhead conveyor powered rail. Divert is then confirmed by a limit switch, and the IBR relays the result to the PLC, which tracks the trolley position in real time.
The high level of integration and intelligence provided by the intelligent IBRs dramatically reduces system hardware costs, especially in comparison to systems using separate barcode readers with standard PLC’s and separate communication networks. The IDC distributed intelligent system also provides additional benefits in terms of reduced cabling and installation times, and also in terms of the modular reusable software the system employs.
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