An eight-year programme of investment into Office Depot’s Europe-wide distribution network has reached a pinnacle in the completion of a highly automated facility near Frankfurt. In addition to providing its PRO racking along with dynamic storage systems, BITO played a central role in bringing the project in on time.

At Office Depot, one of the leading global providers of office products, attention to service has been central to the thinking behind an eight-year programme of investment into reconfiguring the company’s Europe-wide distribution network.

Photo by BITO-Lagertechnik

The pinnacle of the programme is the recently completed Grossostheim distribution centre, 30km south of Germany’s financial centre, Frankfurt. Here a 47 million euro facility, totalling 31,000 sq m and offering 35,000 pallet locations, has been equipped with BITO’s PRO pallet racking and dynamic carton flow racks alongside pick-to-light technology, automated mini-crane tote systems, ‘A’ frame automated picking machines, 4.7km of conveyors and two fully automated sortation systems for despatch.

Remarkably, this highly automated warehouse was completed within a year. Achieving such a tight target required the dedication and well-honed technical skills of the materials handling turnkey contractor BITO, working in close harmony with Office Depot’s planning team.

“‘We’ve been working with BITO since 2001 when they provided us with all the carton live storage and pallet live storage elements for a warehouse in Hamburg on a subcontract basis,” says, Bernd Schiel, Office Depot’s senior project manager and European maintenance co-ordinator. “After the success of that initial project they became the preferred supplier for all future projects, including facilities in Madrid, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Manchester in the UK.”

Schiel continues: “After satisfying ourselves on the quality and capabilities of BITO being able to manage this type of project we appointed the company to act as the main contractor for all storage elements in the system.”

The new facility in Grossostheim was the biggest single warehouse project in Europe for Office Depot. “Many suppliers thought the time scale was too tight,” says Schiel but BITO helped to ensure that the project came in on time and on budget.

The new highly automated distribution centre serves Austria, Southern Germany and parts of Central Germany on a next day delivery basis. It stretches over 31,000 sq m and is divided into four halls. Goods arrive on standard Euro pallets and are put away in the bulk store, which occupies most of Hall Four. Here 14 aisles of 15m high BITO PRO racking are serviced by a fleet of man-up order pickers. BITO’s modular PRO pallet racking system provides a comprehensive choice of upright and beam types for precise adaptation to load requirements.

In Hall 3 half the hall is given over to further bulk storage for larger and wider goods, with BITO’s PRO P6 racking stretching up to 10m high and offering 2.7m wide bays. This area is for full case and non-conveyable items such as laser printers.

The order fulfilment process starts in Hall 3 with three carton erecting machines that create six sizes of cartons over two footprints. The cartons are conveyed through to the main picking area in Hall 2 where they are diverted off to the required picking loops.

In Hall 2 picking activity is arranged for fast, medium and slow moving products. Along the picking aisles, operatives pick goods to cartons using a pick-to-light system, taking items from the BITO SDS dynamic carton flow racks in accordance to instructions generated by the warehouse management system. In aisles dedicated to faster moving products the zones are shorter so that picking operatives don’t have so far to move between picks. An ‘A’ frame automated picking machine is used for reasonably fast moving small sized pack products.

‘Split case’ picking activity takes place over four levels, with picked items – normally full packs such as boxes of photo copy paper – being placed onto a central belt conveyor and moved to a shrink wrapping machine for consolidation. Picked goods move between levels via spiral conveyors.

Cartons moving from the picking aisles in Hall 2 are conveyed to a mezzanine level where they either move on to case lid application and dispatch, if complete, or are conveyed to one of three pick-to-tote stations where small but slow moving items are picked and added to the cartons. The pick-to-tote stations are fed by four fully automated miniload storage and retrieval units.

Completed orders get a final weight check before being sealed and an address label applied to the carton.

The system at Grossostheim is designed to handle 15,000 orders over one and a half shifts and enables a 9 pm cut off for next day delivery to the customer. Bringing the project in on-time and on-budget was a tough call for Bernd Schiel’s team and his main materials handling contractor, BITO. But Schiel was confident it could be done, “our past experience with BITO had shown that they had proven themselves an extremely reliable partner.”

For further information visit www.bito.de