Stepping it up

“They didn’t have any data, so we couldn’t go through the SKUs to say ‘we have 10 of this item that would fit in that bin,’ for example,” Rodway explains. “It was all kind of on the fly. We said ‘we know these are the faster movers; let’s group them together first.’

“We didn’t want any downtime. Once we got that initial load of fast-movers in, we had the time to load the rest in.”

Even though the installation occurred during a very busy period for Mold-Masters, the addition of the carousels did not hinder productivity. In fact, the manufacturer did not miss a single shipment deadline during the changeover.

It didn’t take long for Richardson and his team to recognize a success—within two months, they’d ordered another two shuttles—but in those early days, the machines were not yet able to operate at full potential. The biggest problem was that the company had no way of directly transmitting activity occurring in the VLMs to the ERP.

To temporarily bridge this gap, Rodway and his team created manual Excel workbooks on each machine, which workers uploaded into SAP each night. This gave some visibility, but the tickets only told workers which shuttle the required item was in, not its location within the shuttle.

“They had a guy at each machine doing hot picks, picking one item at a time. They knew where the inventory was, and they didn’t have to search like they did through the old racking, but it was tedious for labour,” Rodway admits.

“But it was still faster than what we were doing before!” Richardson points out.

After about eight months of this, at Johnston’s suggestion, Mold-Masters implemented some software to streamline communication between the shuttles and the ERP. A carousel operation module from Sologlobe called Solochain now serves as bi-directional interface with SAP.

The shuttles in action
Today, the four VLMs contain between 5,000 and 6,000 parts, sorted into bins defined by length, width and size.

Orders are downloaded from the ERP and printed daily as paper pick tickets. Each ticket is placed in a tote. A worker takes four totes—representing four orders—into the shuttle area. For each order, the worker scans the pick ticket, which calls up information on all the parts needed and presents it on both a small touch-screen monitor and a large overhead screen.

Once the operator selects a part on the touch-screen, the shuttle goes into action, moving to get the appropriate tray to the pick face. Once the tray makes it to the pick face, an LED band below the opening lights up, informing the operator where the item she needs is positioned on the tray.