The Poesia Group’s huge tower can be seen from some way off. Employees are are often asked, ‘What’s in that building?’ The answer to the riddle is quite simple: it’s the warehouse. It currently has ten built-in shuttles.

 

In addition to the ever-growing assortment of different products, another reason for the expansion was the continuing increased demand for poesia® products. To avoid delivery bottlenecks, a sufficient quantity of all products must be in stock at all times. Only in this way can delivery be guaranteed within 24 hours.

 

During the construction of the warehouse tower in 2008, four shuttles were installed. In 2014, six more shuttles were added. And with the current expansion, another six shuttles with 180 shelves each will be installed. Seals with a total length of more than 1 million metres can be stored on the total of 980 shelves with 5 storage boxes each. With this stage of expansion, however, the warehouse capacity is far from exhausted. The tower can still hold up to 24 more shuttles.

 

A warehouse management solution should be simple and use clearly structured processes to minimise the risk of errors. That’s why the poesia group uses Power Pick Global, a fully integrated warehouse management software system. This software, by Kardex, is intuitive to use and makes a quick picking process possible. Incoming orders are recorded in the ERP system and forwarded to Power Pick. The forwarding employee in the warehouse selects the order to be processed on the screen, and a short time later the fully automated shuttle drives to the order processing station with the selected product. In the following steps, which are carried out manually, the desired order length is measured, cut, packaged and shipped with a delivery note.

 

The expansion phase was carried out from 27 May to 28 June 2019. The shuttles are built one on top of the other like building blocks by the manufacturer, Kardex AG, a warehouse technology company. Each shuttle is 24 metres high and has an area of 3 x 2 metres.