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Bijoy Ghosh

A product is being scanned using the RFID reader at the Redington warehouse near Chennai. A close-up (right) of the process.

T.E. Raja Simhan

A warehouse is no longer a dumping place with large volumes of goods scattered all over. It is now an efficient storage place with technology at the core of operations.

The Automated Distribution Centre (ADC) of Redington India Ltd at Kavaraipettai, about 45 km from Chennai, exemplifies how technology has made warehousing operations more efficient.

The complexity is that there are around 9,000 pallet locations in a highly vertical storage of racking and about 12,000 shelving locations with necessary bulk storage area. Manually, it will be very difficult to track the right product, says R. Arunachalam, General Manager, Supply Chain Business Initiatives, Redington (I) Ltd. The company handles nearly 70,000 tonnes a year of products on all-India basis and about 12 per cent of this is in Chennai.

The warehouse is radio frequency (RF)-enabled through wireless access points. Employees use hand-held gadgets to pick the right product from the right place. The Motorola hand-held terminals have 2D laser barcode readers with a scan range of about 3 ft. They have 48 keys in the keypad with alpha numeric keys, Windows CE 5.0 operating system and colour display.

The device works like this. It gets information from a remote server on the right product to be picked up for delivery. The location of the pallet is provided in the reader to enable the pick-up person to identify the right product.

The employee goes to the right spot and scans the barcode of the product using the reader to match the right product specification, Arunachalam says.

In the ADC, the entire process is fully automated.

This is right from an order from ERP (enterprise resource planning) to WMS (warehouse management system) to hand-held terminals and reverse. A person is guided till he picks up the product. However, in a manual operation the person has to remember the right location to pick up or drop the product. In this context there could be a lot of human errors, which is completely avoided in the ADC, he says.

Each hand-held terminal costs Rs 60,000, and accessories cost another Rs 20,000. The important function is that technology provides a paperless and online system. In a barcoded system the errors committed by the users can also be eliminated. Operations with these terminals are also system-driven. Efficiencies of resources, including manpower and equipment, can also be tracked, he says.

With a Windows CE operating system, the WMS is connected through a Thin Client. Internet Explorer of Windows CE is used because the WMS is an IE-based solution. The WMS can link with external mobile devices, which is one of its features, in this case with the hand-held devices,” says Arunachalam. There are rotating cameras with IP-enabled digital video recorders that help anyone to use this IP address and see from any part of the world, he adds.

raja@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Storage | Supply Chain Management

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