Packaging

KEHE REALIZES 300% PRODUCTIVITY GAIN WITH INTELLIGRATED AND AUTOMATION DYNAMICS

Wednesday 24. November 2010 - Natural food industry giant's Allentown, Pa. facility achieves 99.9% order accuracy and cuts operating costs per square foot in half

Intelligrated, a leading North American-owned automated material handling solutions provider, announces that its collaboration with system integrator Automation Dynamics has achieved 300% distribution center productivity gains for KeHE Distributors, a leading U.S. distributor of natural and specialty food products to small and mass market retailers across the country.
KeHE, which operates 13 DCs across the United States, instigated a centralization strategy that consolidated two of the company’s Northeastern DCs into a new 312,000-square-foot DC in Allentown, Pa., forming a single, high efficiency operation. According to KeHE Vice President of Distribution Operations, Craig Turner, the DCs were operating at maximum capacity and were unable to accommodate increasing demand. The challenge was to redesign the Allentown facility to reduce the number of touches, meet increased order throughput and efficiency and to build in reserve capacity for future growth.
The Allentown installation, valued at $1.8 million, is a hybrid system of horizontal pick carousels, a pick- and put-to-light carton flow module and a conveyor system to route product through the various pick and pack zones. The system optimizes cubing and vertical space to achieve a dense pick, minimized footprint and increased picking accuracy while maximizing the efficiency of the existing labor pool.
“We are extremely pleased with the effective teamwork and cooperation between KeHE, Intelligrated and Automation Dynamics,” said Turner. “We think that our design here can outperform any competitors in an each pick environment. Other systems have pick-to-light and carousels, but they use them in such a traditional way that they do not reach their full potential. The system integration team did an excellent job studying our SKU mix to rethink these technologies.”