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ATRIA OY relies on E-DPS
ATRIA OY relies on E-DPS
About a year ago, the Finnish meat producer ATRIA OY expanded its distribution center at the company’s headquarters in Nurmo with the modular storage and picking system “Ergonomic Dynamic Picking System” (E-DPS) from WITRON, the general contractor for warehouse logistics based in Parkstein. As a result, the already very high efficiency in order picking has increased by a factor of 1.6 with the same number of employees.
Customer: ATRIA OY
In combination with WITRON’s “Order Picking System” (OPS), which has been in service since 2000 and for whose implementation ATRIA was awarded Finland’s Logistics Company of the Year 2003, the E-DPS allows ATRIA OY to process some 78,000 additional orderlines per day and thus ship a significantly higher volume of goods from Nurmo.
Location
Nurmo (FIN)
Industry sector
Food & Beverage
Products
4,000 customers with more than 600 different products
Solutions
E-DPS, OPS
Volume
1,000 orderlines per basic module per hour
Special features of the project
In food retailing, there is a growing trend towards more individual and more frequent delivery cycles - for logistics, this means that smaller shipment sizes go hand in hand with a greater number of deliveries. This flexibility must also be reflected in order picking to ensure continuous delivery capability and generate additional demand. Given that both OPS and E-DPS are standardized systems based on the WITRON module strategy, it took no time at all to upgrade the OPS software that had been in use for more than 5 years and then synchronize it with the new E-DPS solution.
Challenge
The distribution center in Nurmo uses the highly dynamic stacker cranes known as “Picking Mini Loads” (PMLs). Up to three PMLs are combined per E-DPS module to form a unit and serve the picking stations assigned. Due to approx. 400 tote movements per PML per hour, an extremely impressive picking performance of roughly 1,000 orderlines per basic module per hour is possible! ATRIA OY currently uses a total of 30 PMLs and 20 state-of-the-art, highly ergonomic, and customized picking workstations.
Customer opinion
With the same number of employees, our picking output has increased once again by a factor of 1.6. In our highly competitive market environment, this will secure us an extremely important cost advantage over our competitors for the next few years and enable us to sustainably increase customer satisfaction. In addition, the fill level of totes has increased once again by some ten percent with E-DPS, since missing items can now be supplied later to the customer totes. This saving on shipping totes also leads to significantly lower transportation costs within the entire supply chain.