Arlington Heights, IL: German supermarket retailer Edeka has teamed up with Witron Logistik + Informatik to design and build a dry grocery distribution center in Landsberg am Lech, Germany.
The 270,000-square-foot distribution center is expected to be completed in early 2013 and will supply nearly 1,700 stores with 16,000 SKUs.
Edeka is installing Witron's OPM (Order Picking Machinery), DPS (Dynamic Picking System) and CPS (Car Picking System).
- The OPM system is a fully automated case picking and palletizing system that can process up to 18,000 SKUs.
- The DPS is a goods-to-man tote based solution for piece and case/tote picking. The DPS system will be used for piece picking of products such as cosmetics, general merchandise and tobacco into returnable totes at 12 ergonomic workstations.
- CPS is a voice-guided system for manual pallet picking with automatic replenishment. The system is used for picking of cases with large volume.
In the future, 14 COMs (Case Order Machines) will allow a fully automatic, store-friendly production of order pallets and roller containers, without staff deployment and with zero picking errors, at the distribution center. The COM allows cases to be automatically stacked atop order pallets in a store-friendly sequence, without any of the gaps around the cases that result in most robotic pallet-building applications.
