Latexco, together with Actemium, designed an automated solution for stacking mattresses, with creation of an intermediate buffer. Advantages? Better ergonomics for the employees and a larger capacity.
From production, different formats of mattresses arrive interchangeably to the automatic warehouse. For each mattress, the automatic crane selects the right size of pallet. Once a pallet is full, it is taken out of the automatic warehouse.
After the development of the custom-made automatic warehouse, the customer asked us to carry out a simulation. For this we took into account the following factors:
- Do we achieve the necessary takt times based on the historical production data of last year?
- Determining the average utilization of import and export transport
- How does the variation in mattress types affect proper operation?
- How many pallet locations do we need to operate smoothly with the necessary expansion possibilities?
- What logic must be built into our Warehouse Control System (WCS) to work as efficiently as possible?
- What are the influences of optimizations such as reshuffling, double play, …?
For the simulation we worked with historical production master data of 1 year and kept the possibility open to easily implement a change in production capacity. In addition, we also looked at what type of mattresses were in the future production schedule at any given time, so we could take that into account as well.