Food and Beverage Material Handling Case Study:

Key Technology

• Automated Case Flow Module with 140 roller lanes utilizing motorized drive rollers and gravity conveyor
• TGW mini-loadAS/RS for lower velocity SKU's
• T-Tek Automated Palletizer
• WulfTec Stretch Wrapper
• Exacta Human Machine Interface(HMI) Software
• Panasonic Camera System and DVR
• Mettler-Toledo ExpressWeigh Scale and Banner Height Check

Business Challenges

• Pepsi's existing operation in Warrenton, VA was entirely manual. Labor costs were rising while employee turnover rates were very high
• The US beverage industry as a whole is experiencing an increasing number of SKU's
• Fuel costs are continuing to increase for mixed pallet delivery
• Customers are demanding increased delivery accuracy

Results

• The system handles over 350 SKU's while producing mixed pallets at 1500-2000 cases per hour
• The amount of labor required to process orders was decreased by two thirds
• The system has greatly reduced damaged goods
• The system allows Pepsi Central Virginia to be ASN (Advanced Shipping Notice) compatible
• The system allows Pepsi to meet the demands of their customers with greater accuracy, quality, and shorter order cycle times

Case Study Video- Script

Everyone knows the Pepsi Globe. While Pepsi is one of the most well-known brands in the world, it is specialty drinks like iced tea, water, and code-branded products like Starbucks frappucinos that really pull in the margins. As Jay Jessub, the current owner said, if Essau Jessub knew we were selling bottled water, he'd be rolling out of his chair, laughing.

Pepsi of Central Virginia, or Pepsi CVA, has a proud legacy of being the oldest documented Pepsi franchises in the world. Started in 1908 by S. A. Jessub, one of this organization's first bold moves in speeding up distribution involved a switch from horse-drawn carriages to trucks, increasing their distribution radius to a staggering 20 miles. 100 years later, Pepsi CVA's bottling plants, distribution facilities, and fleet of trucks are delivering 10 million cases of product per year up and down eastern half of sweet Virginia. Unlike most Pepsi distributors, Pepsi CVA is a franchise. This allows them the latitude to try unproven products and experiment with distribution methods that may be too small in scale or too risky to appeal to Pepsi corporate. It's this insurgent attitude led to a very profitable venture with Glasso Brands a starter that was subsequently sold to competitor Coca-Cola and also allowed them to experiment with automated mixed-case-palletizing, one of the biggest challenges in the soft drink industry.

In September of 2007, BMH was asked to visit Pepsi in Warrenton to asses their mixed case palletizing system. While conceptually sound, it was not robust enough for day to day use, with frustrating software and hardware issues that made smooth running almost impossible. Our goals for this project were to improve system software and hardware, to prevent routine production-halting failures, simplify the user-interface so that one average user could attend to the overall system, and increase system output from an erratic 1000-1200 cases per hour to a more respectable 1800-2000 cases per hour.

This project took place in Warrenton, VA, gateway to the VA Piedmont Region and the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is located on a route that is formerly the Warrenton Turnpike, a road marched on by both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. This area is of strategic value to Pepsi in the present day because it is close enough to Washington D.C. to serve portions of this significant market, yet remote enough to keep land and infra-structure costs down.

This is the Pepsi Mixed-Case Palletizing System. We'll walk through the system flow, one area at a time.

The induction and replenishment area serves as a point of entry for a product into the system. Here you see a fork truck bound by a rail with a device on the mask called a Ty-Guard Claw, simply known on the warehouse floor as the claw. A standard fork truck feeds the staging area in front of the claw. Pallets are loosely placed by their velocity with the fastest movers on the left, closest to the in-feed, and slower moving products in the middle. This SKU equation is a bit muddled, as the same pallet used for system replenishment are the same pallets as on the far right for starter pallets. When the system calls for inventory, the claw picks up single or multiple layers of product and places them on the transport conveyor, which acts as a buffer for the import conveyor. In the area of the drawing marked Inbound Cases, a warehouse associate will drop off pallets of product that are stored in nearby pallet racking to fulfill requests from the system.

When the product is ready to be fed in the sorter, a one-digit barcode is placed on the lead case. This barcode tells the system that a new SKU is being fed in. If a barcode is read when it is not expected or a no-read occurs, operator acknowledgment is required by the human-machine-interphase or HMI in order to continue product in-feed. This is done to prevent feeding the product into the wrong lane or over-filling a sort lane. Prior product entering the pace-sorter, a meter is set up in each lane to allow for proper gapping prior to being released in to the system. Motor Driven Rollers, or MDR's, were retrofitted on tiers two and three due to challenges involved in metering and releasing these products into the sorter. Prior to the release of product into the sorter, a device called the pusher-turner uses a timing belt and encoder to position itself at the top of that product's inventory location. The pusher-turner doses exactly what its name implies. When the product reaches this pneumatic device, it triggers an air cylinder that pushes the product 90 degrees off the conveyor and into its designated sort lane. Each of the four levels has its own pusher-turner.

Initially, all of the sort-lanes were gravity, but BMH and Pepsi determined that a powered solution would be necessary in certain lanes to get cases robotically in and out of the sorter. Motor driven rollers with durable flat bands were added if the product had packaging with a high product of friction or was of a size that would regularly stall out on the conveyor rollers. The discharge portion of the sort lanes use pneumatic cylinders to raise platforms to the height of the stopper bars allowing it to roll onto the take-away conveyors. Products are released in the order that they are released in order to properly build the mixed case pallets. ASAP and BMH Controls put a significant amount of time into the software to make sure the system released its product quickly and reliably.

From the sorter, all four tears use live-roller conveyor as a buffer to prevent downstream starvation of product. Working its way around the inside perimeter of the system, the tear four output is sent to the manual palletizing line, while tears one through three deliver product through a three-way vertical merge to the automatic palletizer line.

After the three-way merge, BMH retrofitted motor-driven rollers to replace the existing mechanically actuated zero pressure accumulation. Due to the highly varied weights and case sizes, it was very hard to dial in this accumulation, resulting in cartons running together and jamming the automatic palletizer, or accidentally diverting product to the manual palletizing station. This was one of the earliest successes of the project, and it worked so well that anywhere positive control of the accumulation systems was needed, the NDR solution was adopted. One of the biggest threats to high system throughput is a palletizer jam. This can happen from many reasons, but a common one prior to this project was an incorrect product being fed into the palletizer and either jamming it on the palletizer apron or making an uneven product layer. As product was added to the layer and to the next, this wear link would eventually cause this weak layer to collapse resulting in many crutial minutes of downtown clean-up and a spot inventory to see what was needed to recover the damaged layers. To prevent this problem before it could travel up to the palletizer, a banner height detection set-up and a Metler Toledo-In Line Scale, were tied to a look-up table, verifying every product goes by to ensure the correct product is going into the palletizer. If a discrepancy is detected, the zone after the scale would stop running, and operator verification would be necessary to restart this portion of the system. This set-up has paid significant dividends in preventing product displacement only when previously detected too late. Once products have been sent to the palletizer, the layers are designed using algorithms by ASAP Automation. The goal is to have as much of the product as possible put on the product at this station, rather than the down stream manual station.

A TGW NedCon automated storage and retrieval system is used to store and dispense slow-moving product and certain packages that are too large to be stored in the sorter. In order to meet the day's product demand, filling of the ASRS starts before the shift in order to prevent starvation of the stream later on in the day.

The ASRS, the output of tier four from the sorter, and product diverted from the automated palletizing line are sent to the manual palletizing station. Motor-driven rollers were added at all merge points leading up to this station to prevent product from running together and being discharged form the wrong group. At the end of the line, the operator of the manual pallet building station, the operator hand stacks last layer or two of odd products that can't be put on the palletizer by machine. Due to the proliferation of SKU's with custom shaped bottles and unusual case sizes, this system has a higher utilization than called for in the original design. Future systems call for a more ergonomic design where at least three sides of the pallet can be easily accessed.

Upon completion of the manual pallet build, the pallet is sent to the stretch wrap station, and from there, to the discharge. BMH replaced the gravity discharge with two sections of zero pressure accumulation with fork truck protection. This greatly reduced the risk of a pallet losing product from the top layer or ending up lopsided due to hitting the end stop at high speed. Upon exiting the system, pallet levels and shipping manifests are printed out at an ergonomic height for fork lift drivers to get the paperwork without leaving their seat. Completed orders are then loaded directly into the assigned trailer, eliminating the floor storage of completed pallets that plagues the facility prior to completing this system.

After working through an evaluation period, between St. Ives Company, Pepsi CVA and BMH, we were awarded the project in September of 2007. After our customer kick-off and initial engineering work in November, the project really started moving right into the midst of the holidays. This will be discussed in the lessons learned. As equipment arrived after the New Year and unit testing revealed successes in some areas, while others required additional improvement, Pepsi and BMH honed in the system until we were successfully running full days of live orders in March of 2008. As stated, this work is still a work in progress, and some improvements were made after Pepsi was using the system on a day to day process to meet production needs.

Installation progress was based on the magnitude of an area's problems and the equipment lead time. At the beginning of the project, the server was having problems simply communicating to the main gue and the workstations. ASAP Automation did a good bit of work up front to correct this and other IT-related problems. Knowing that we needed flexible and knowledgeable installers to partner with us on this phase of the project, BMH chose Indiana Industrial Systems to install controls hardware in the sorter area. Work in the sorter was awkward and time consuming, and BMH contacted temporary help to install the motor-driven rollers and associated banding in order to stay on schedule. January brought about additional motor installation, and February and March were long periods of incremental improvements, changes, testing, and retesting to produce a reliable system. In July, well after beneficial use, it was determined that product in-feed was still a troubling spot for metering product into the sorter. It was determined that the speed up-spools of the line-shaft conveyor and the solenoid actuated breaks weren't accurate enough to control the in-feed on tiers two and three. It was decided to retrofit this area with motor-driven rollers, and, like before, it proved to be a simple, robust was to get product tightly controlled within the system.

BMH would like to thank our installation partners and suppliers. In particular, ASAP Automation for their very dedicated work behind the scenes at virtually any hour of the day and Virginia Riggers for mechanical installation services and pneumatic design assistance that were very important for the success of this project.

The target for system performance was 1800-2000 cases per hour. Testing has revealed that, depending on the order profiles for the day, an output can be achieved from 1400-2200 cases per hour. Additional study has shown that the Tie-Guard Claw operator is very critical to maintaining this output and starving the in-feed in order to build starter pallets and vice-versa is a bottle-neck for the system. Despite this, the retailers are impressed with the increased order-accuracy and Pepsi CVA is working on a direct ship notice program to get preferred drop-off notice for retailers such as Walmart and Target. The system has reduced overtime costs by getting product palletized and out of the warehouse more efficiently, and their new program of loading directly from the system to the truck has saved even more time. The success of this project has proven that a mixed-case-palletizing system of this nature is a viable concept and can be scaled to larger facilities that can benefit from all the lessons learned of this project.

The successful completion of this project has had many benefits for Pepsi CVA. The floor space that was lost to an idle system is now rapidly moving inventory through it to quickly and accurately fulfill orders. Veteran employees, who previously approached this system with skepticism, now prefer building orders using the system and have made recommendations to Pepsi and BMH personnel to improve the user-interface of the system as well as general improvement. Pepsi CVA now has a functional system they can promote to other bottlers of the capabilities and benefits of advanced automation over hand-picking abilities.

At the completion of the project, several things stood out. The HMI told the user-interface turned the unweilding system, heavily based on operator knowledge to something that is much more manageable. Information is logically presented that eliminates much of the analysis and guess-work that previously needed to take place in order to run the system. BMH may not have owned the original design, but we were able to work through issues using existing equipment providers, engineer solutions within the confines of the system layout, and produce a finished product that meets the needs of the customer at a reasonable profit. Finally, utilizing local, skilled labor has been beneficial in the long term by providing resources for Pepsi CVA and giving BMH contacts for potential future projects.