Do You Want to Make Your Layer Picking More Dynamic?
Distribution, storage, and warehouse dynamics are all rapidly changing. Particularly in the food and beverage sectors, the pace is faster and the product diversity is significantly greater.
As a result, orders for mixed SKU pallets are more common than full pallet orders of a single SKU at distribution centres.
However, if you use a layer pick application, you can fill large orders five times more quickly with a single person than with several.
Top Industries Inc. has also come out with a layer picker arrangement with a forklift designed for many companies.
The majority of distribution centres and warehouses are struggling with a significant labour shortage. Layer picking can provide them with a whole arm of precise, extremely effective picking support, going beyond simply lending a hand.
Building mixed SKU rainbow pallets can be accomplished much more quickly than with manual case picking by picking and depositing full case layers using a layer pick arm. Picking layers from between 50 and 500 SKUs is excellent for high-volume staging or mixing centres that pick more than 1000 layers each day.
Layer picking can only be made more efficient by combining it with a pallet flow rack. Reverse flow lanes hold empty pallets in place to palletize and then transfer them to the other aisle for extraction. Pallet flow lanes deliver single SKU pallets to the chosen aisle for simple selection.
The processing increases that facilities as the requirement are provided by this seamless symphony of blended technologies, which also lessens dependency on labour.
The secret ingredient that makes it all work is the layer-pick separator. In order to allow the layer pick arm to hold one or more case layers, each pallet flow lane has a layer pick separator that separates the pallet at the pick aisle.
Until the empty pallet is finally removed from the lane, the pallet divider keeps the back pallets separated from the pick aisle pallet. The rear pallets will automatically advance for filling in the pick face after the empty pallet has been removed.
A new way of building a mixed-SKU pallet
- Set up on pick-aisle’s one or both sides of the high-volume individual SKUs lanes.
- The forklift pulls to the end of the lane and then secures an empty pallet available on the forks using the suction tool or layer pick clamp.
- The driver continues to assemble the pallet by picking one or more layers from the assortment of products in the SKU lanes for each pick.
- Layer 1 will represent SKU A, Layer 2 will represent SKU B, Layers 3 and 4 will represent SKU C, and Layer 5 will represent SKU D.
- After completing the order, the driver places the pallet at the edge of the track and then picks up a fresh one to start the procedure over.
- The finished pallet is recovered, wrapped, and moved to a storage area or dock staging for shipping out.
Top Industries Inc. has also designed this arrangement for a number of industries and here is Linkedin profile to know about them if you are interested.
