April 01 2013
Wirtz Beverage Illinois invests for long-term growth
Wirtz installs Westfalia's AS/RS and WMS
Like many companies in the beverage industry, Wirtz Beverage Illinois was faced with the challenge of expansion to support increased demand. Westfalia’s AS/RS and WMS provide Wirtz Beverage with the ability to adapt to changing market conditions while enabling future growth of the business.
"The design led to us being more cost and labor efficient,” said Richard (Rocky) Ruane, Director of Warehouse Operations.
Working together, Westfalia and Wirtz Beverage designed an AS/RS, which includes three tandem cranes capable of moving 200 pallets per hour, carrying more than 1,000 SKU’s and 2.2 million cases of inventory. Wirtz Beverage was able to increase loading capacity to 78,000 cases over a period of 10 hours. The system takes up only 110K square feet yet is able to store 1.3M cases in abou t one third of the space of a conventional warehouse alternative.
Also, designed within the AS/RS are eight fully integrated pick modules with the company’s highest volume product. The system (S/RM) replenishes the modules automatically into the pick face via pallet flow lanes. This solution fulfills 75 percent to 80 percent of the case needs for Wirtz Beverage customers.
Ruane continued, “our receiving docks were set up in front of the AS/RS which gives us the efficiency of not having to drive throughout the warehouse to put away all of our inbound product. We cut our receiving time of our primary product in half.”
Westfalia’s Savanna.NET® Warehouse Management System is the power behind the AS/RS. Savanna.NET® provides control of all product flows and maximum system flexibility which allowed Westfalia to customize the functionality specific to Wirtz Beverage.