Success Story

3D warehouse management with Forklift Guidance System

Customer

JACKON Insulation by BEWI

Location

Germany

Solutions deployed

JACKON Insulation by BEWI is a leading manufacturer of insulation and construction boards made of extruded polystyrene rigid foam (XPS) and has been offering outstanding solutions for the construction and insulation market, both nationally and internationally, for over 35 years.

The spirit of innovation with regard to automation and digitalization has always been a top priority at JACKON Insulation by BEWI. The innovative 3D warehouse management and forklift control system solution from ABF was needed to master the intralogistics challenges at the Mechau production plant.
The intralogistics suite was connected to the existing ERP system and ensures material tracking and material flow control in the warehouse. The material transports are carried out using 13 forklift trucks of different makes and tugger trains.

3D Forklift Guidance System for automatic material bookings

For clean warehouse management, it is necessary for material movements by forklift truck to be booked correctly and without gaps in the system. The ABF Forklift Guidance System was introduced to avoid errors and unnecessary effort caused by manual bookings of material movements.

In conjunction with an RTLS (Real-time Locating System) based on LiDAR and coupled front sensors, it ensures automatic and seamless material tracking. This leads to traceability and therefore an increase in performance thanks to automatic load change detection without input at the forklift terminal. Starting at the end of the production line, in the interim storage area and in the production supply up to the final storage of the pallets in the finished goods warehouse, the material transports are thus automatically (without barcode scans) recorded in the system in the exact position. ABF can look back on 15 years of experience in the field of transport equipment tracking and was therefore able to provide the complete engineering and thus the needs-based design of the forklift truck equipment with RTLS and sensor technology in addition to the forklift control system software for this project.

Optimal support for order processing

Another important component of the forklift guidance system is the system guidance for processing the pending material transports. Transport orders are displayed to the forklift drivers on the vehicle terminal (tablet) mounted in the vehicle and processing becomes child’s play with the support of modern 3D warehouse visualization. When the transport order is completed, the new storage location is booked fully automatically via the interface to the inventory-managing ERP system. This means that manual input in the ERP is no longer necessary.

Full transparency thanks to cross-plant warehouse management

All material movements reported by the Forklift Guidance System are recorded in the ABF warehouse management system (WMS). From the raw materials warehouse to the finished goods warehouse, every pallet is fully recorded. This allows continuous traceability in the event of quality defects or damage and is absolutely essential due to the high quantities stored in the open-air warehouse.

The MFT Desktop offers all the necessary functions of modern digital warehouse management. In addition, all material stocks are displayed transparently and precisely in a 3D warehouse visualization (digital twin).

Optimized material flow control

The ABF WMS also ensures plant-wide material flow control. Thanks to the complete integration of OneBase^®MFT into the existing IT landscape (production plant control systems and ERP), it is possible to automatically generate transport orders for storage and retrieval. An underlying set of rules is used to determine the ideal storage locations, depending on availability, dimensions or other definable criteria. Of course, transfer orders can also be generated manually at any time and automatically generated ones can be modified. The situation-adaptive set of rules can also be used for manually generated orders, for example to calculate the best storage location for a putaway.

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3D warehouse management with Forklift Guidance System

3D Forklift Guidance System for automatic material bookings

Optimal support for order processing

Full transparency thanks to cross-plant warehouse management

Optimized material flow control

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