Grifols

From their plasma donation centers, Grifols collects plasma from healthy and qualified donors to send to one of three state-of-the-art biopharmaceutical manufacturing facilities located in Barcelona, Spain, Los Angeles, California and Clayton, North Carolina.

At Grifols, innovation means finding new ways of solving old problems, which is where automated warehousing is now playing a role in improving global blood plasma logistics.

Faced with the need to expand the storage capacity for frozen blood plasma to match the recently increased capacities of the manufacturing facilities, Grifols embarked on a journey to build a highly automated plasma logistics center in Clayton, North Carolina, in close proximity of its large scale east coast manufacturing operation.

In order to protect the valuable product, this new rack-supported building is equipped with a multi-level redundancy refrigeration system including nitrogen back up.

Westfalia’s automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS), combined with Savanna.NET® Warehouse Execution System (WES), supports Grifols’ continued innovation in its modern, state-of-the-art facilities. The AS/RS occupies 17,273 square feet with 5,148 pallet positions. Standing nine storage levels high, the three-aisle AS/RS is equipped with three storage/retrieval machines (S/RMs), one tandem-pallet and two single S/RMs.

The design of the system is based on Westfalia’s Satellite® technology, which provides the ability to store pallets in multiple-deep storage lanes. The Westfalia high-density Satellite® S/RM is representative of the new, high speed, fourth generation of S/RM design. Due to its sophisticated structural design, it is one of the heaviest-duty-cycle S/RMs available today.

Managing the flow of materials is Westfalia’s Savanna.NET® WES. Savanna.NET® provides complete control over material flow, order management, reporting, and logging, and is compatible with Grifols’ Host Interface.