New: AutoStore® warehouse for Eggers Textilpflege GmbH in Bückeburg
For more than 130 years, the medium-sized family business Eggers Textilpflege GmbH has been taking care of individual textile service. The affiliated partner of Deutsche Berufskleider Leasing GmbH sets up an innovative AutoStore® system for the storage of small parts at its Bückeburg site.
Hörmann Logistik convinced with an individual concept that enables particularly fast and safe order picking and thus received the order for realization.
The concept
The customized AutoStore® system configuration for Eggers Textilpflege relies on several simulation runs with real data. The result yielded the following components:
- 5 „Red Line“ robots with 5 charging stations
- 10.000 bins on 16 levels. Dimensions per bin: 649 mm x 449 mm x 330 mm (L x W x H), overall weight: 35 kg each. Maximum system capacity: 15.700 bins
- 2 carousel ports for storage and picking (including pre-configuration for two additional carousel frames)
- Aluminum grid system, sheathed on two sides, as a single-double grid with overall dimensions of 16.4 m x 23.4 m x 6.5 m (L x W x H), adapted to the storehouse with a height of 11.23 m
Maximum efficiency and flexibility
The system concept provides for all workstations to be set up for both goods receipt and order picking.
The bin stacks stand directly on the hall floor. On the grid system (single-double grid) above, the battery-powered, autonomous robots cooperatively pick up bins, sort them and serve them at the carousel ports. Dividers allow flexible storage of multiple items within a single bin.
The "Red Line" robots move in two directions. Thanks to their four pairs of wheels arranged at right angles, they can reach any position in the grid. They communicate via WLAN with the AutoStore® controller that assigns the transport orders. In case of low order load or low battery capacity, the robots drive themselves to one of the charging stations located at the edge of the grid. The AutoStore® controller sits on the connected service platform.
AutoStore® can process complete picking orders (task group) with different picking positions (task). AutoStore® continuously optimizes the amount of time required to deliver the bins in order to reduce the total time for an order to a minimum.
Most requested bins be on the top due to the natural distribution of product demand. Nonetheless, even retrieval of bins from the lowest level of the grid takes only 3 minutes and 36 seconds - plus the time it takes the robot to transport them to the port. During the reordering process, other robots continue to transport available bins to free ports. This maximizes efficiency and performance in the picking process.
The AutoStore® system at Eggers Textilpflege will go into operation in July 2022.
