Retail Asia 2018 JunJuly2018 | Page 18

TRENDING gentle transport of goods in pouches. Two main advantages derived from this concept are: crashes of pouches and goods that usually occur on declining conveyors are avoided; and the horizontal allocation enables an optimal use of space with a compact and adapted steel structure, which can also be built up to several floors. Switches are used as diverter elements between circulating and accumulation conveyors within storage loops, the matrix sorter or for in-feed to or take-away from work stations. “The new SSI Carrier is approximately 10% smaller than existing systems on the market. This way, we are able to buffer up to 10% more carriers,” stressed Klaus Hiesgen, managing director of HSP GmbH, the competence centre for overhead conveying systems in the SSI Schaefer group. The reduced size results in increased storage density and thus the system contributes to increased efficiency and reduced costs. Another advantage of the overhead conveying system is the flexible and gentle transport in pouches of hanging goods and flat goods of the business areas Pharmaceuticals, Cosmetics, Electronics or F&B. The speed of the conveyor can easily be adapted to the characteristics of the transported goods. Parallel processing of multiple sales channels — including efficient returns management A very efficient application of the system is dynamic returns buffering. The returned and checked goods are registered, placed in pouches and stored directly in a dynamic buffer for direct sales. Then, the goods are transported to a batch buffer and are immediately ready for shipping. The process ensures permanent and reliable availability of the buffered items and meets a direct requirement for e-commerce. The matrix sorter is used for sorting load carriers in order to create correctly sequenced customer orders from batches. For this purpose, entire lines are retrieved from the batch buffer to undergo one or several sorting steps. After that, the correctly sequenced orders can be repacked at the packing stations or further processed. Based on the multi-order picking principle, fewer accesses to individual items in the warehouse are generated and the 16 Retail Asia June/July 2018 SSI Carrier System is a single drive system with five different functions: conveying, accumulating, distributing, buffering and sorting. “With the in-house development of the SSI Carrier and the steel structure, together with the suitable IT solution, the customer receives a one-source solution at SSI Schaefer.” — Klaus Hiesgen, Managing Director of HSP GmbH staff deployment is correspondingly optimised. In addition to processing e-commerce orders, the SSI Carrier system facilitates store-friendly delivery — this means that one single system can easily sequence several sizes of the same item for the store. Single-source solution The sophisticated, user-friendly software and control technology of SSI Schaefer perfects this overhead conveying system. Cutting-edge visualisation technology and optimum interfaces to the customer system ensure that it can be smoothly integrated into almost any type of warehouse. “The e-commerce business faces a highly dynamic development. Goods — increasingly also food and beverage — must arrive at the customers faster and faster. Performances with up to 10,000 load carriers per hour and a matrix sorting of B2C orders in this dimension and with this product variety are only possible with the SSI Carrier system. We offer our e-commerce customers a cost-efficient and compact solution for large dynamic buffers. With the in- house development of the SSI Carrier and the steel structure, together with the suitable IT solution, the customer receives a one-source solution at SSI Schaefer,” Hiesgen summed up. ra