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Warehouse Management  Success story


Warehouse automation maximises service levels at TVH


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ustomer service is a must for TVH, the world's largest independent distributor of forklift trucks and components. From its automated warehouse


in South-West Belgium, TVH stocks 450,000 parts from which it meets more than 5500 orders per day. Orders received before 18:00 hours, and last minute before 19:00 hours, are shipped the same day, reaching customers throughout Europe within 24 hours and the rest of the world within 48 hours. Vanderlande Industries supplied the majority of the goods handling systems for TVH’s highly automated logistics process.


Expansion in new warehouse


Continued strong growth forced TVH to leave its former facilities at several locations and move to a new central warehouse. The existing separate sites had led to increased complexity, leading to higher costs, a greater risk of errors and earlier cut-off times for outbound shipments. Since expansion was impossible at any of the existing sites, TVH decided to build a completely new warehouse. Ramp-up of the new warehouse took place during 2004.


Automated order processing


TVH had already taken the decision to replace its manual order fulfilment process with an automated system. As a first step


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MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS


IT March 2011


Vanderlande built a pilot in one of the existing buildings in 2000 to start gaining experience for a smooth switch to full automation in the new warehouse. At the same time their own IT specialists were developing and installing their new WMS. After successful implementation, they gave Vanderlande the task to install the majority of the automated storage and order picking systems. Since then, TVH has continuously worked on further improving their warehouse logistics process. Because their business continued to grow steadily, TVH needed to expand their material handling system and selected Vanderlande again to implement it. The expansion was taken into operation in three phases, the final one in the summer of 2010. During installation and commissioning, the existing system remained fully operational, so customer service levels were not affected. System capacity was doubled, from 10,000 order lines per day to 20,000 order lines per day.


Consistently high service level


“Thanks to the high level of automation in order fulfilment, we can deliver a consistently high service level, with even later order cut-off times and faster shipment to customers,” said Erik Deceuninck, project manager at TVH. “Productivity is now much higher than before and we have been able to reduce picking errors to an absolute minimum. This automated warehouse process further strengthens our ability to fulfil our mission of serving customers as a full-service, global,


one-stop supplier of forklift trucks and all the necessary support components and accessories.”


Goods receiving


Incoming shipments are unpacked and goods are taken to their assigned storage location by the internal transport system, which covers the entire building.


Storage based on size and sales velocity


A wide range of storage systems is used to ensure the fastest, most efficient parts storage and access. Goods are stored in different ‘zones’ in the warehouse, in a variety of storage systems depending on size and sales velocity. ‘Medium movers’ are placed in a 16- aisle miniload AS/RS with a capacity of


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