Knapp upgrades shuttle system

ATLANTA – KNAPP announced the release of the OSR Shuttle Evo to the North American market at Modex 2018. It is an upgrade to the shuttle technology the company has been offering for the past 15 years.

According to Rudi Lueg, SVP sales for KNAPP, “The OSR Shuttle Evo brings new simplicity to the increasingly complex world of logistics. We are redefining flexibility, efficiency, scalability, system interconnection and process with this new product release.”

At the company’s Modex press conference Lueg said the shuttle’s modular design now “decouples storage location from performance”, with the ability to add shuttles without needing to modify the system architecture. As well, each shuttle can reach every location on its own level.  “It’s an absolute gamechanger,” he said.

Integrating lifts, order sequencing and delivery into the new shuttle design allows for more flexibility for manufacturers and retailers. The units can handle totes, trays and cartons up to 50 kilograms, all at once.

The OSR Shuttle Evo supports a variety of workstation alternatives based on client needs and availability of labour – from quality control stations using vision technology, to automated goods-to-person technologies, to fully automated robotic stations with the Pick-it-Easy Robot and even palletizers for fully automated case picking operations. It also handles a variety of loads – including cases, trays and totes – in single or multi-deep configurations.

The new OSR Shuttle Evo is fully integrated with the latest KiSoft WCS and WMS solutions. KNAPP says it has client commitments for 10 major systems in 2018 with over 4,000 shuttles.

KNAPP also showed its Red Pilot warehouse control system at Modex. Endowed with machine learning capabilities, Red Pilot offers end-to-end control of all warehouse resources in real time. In its first deployment, at seven sites belonging to a German grocery retailer, the system yielded better than three percent reduction in operating costs, said Kevin Reader, Knapp’s director of business development and marketing.