Goods to man order picking system for pharmaceuticals at Picking Farma for 2,400 orders per day
Picking Farma, located in Santa Perpetua de Mogoda (Barcelona), Spain, is a third party logistics services provider (3PL) for the pharmaceutical industry. Vanderlande has installed a goods-to-man based order picking system with 8 workstations in Picking Farma’s warehouse.
Picking Farma supplies medicines and ‘over-the counter’ (OTC) products to more than 40 clients in the pharmaceutical industry. The company operates a 32,000 square metre warehouse, large enough to handle 2,400 orders per day. Vanderlande's goods-to-man order picking concept was selected for order fulfilment because it delivers very high picking accuracy. Being a logistics services provider it is very hard to predict order volume on a day-to-day basis. Picking Farma selected this concept because of its flexibility in handling variations in order structure.
Contrary to traditional order picking processes, order totes remain in the flow rack while product totes move through the different areas (goods-to-man principle). The innovative system prepares orders in waves by using a fast recirculation ring to deliver product totes to order picking stations. Working with a put-to-light system has several advantages, such as picking accuracy and quick response time, so that small urgent batches can be introduced in between large ones. By selecting only the orders needed in each batch, pre-picking speed is increased. This system can deal with a large number of locations without increasing its complexity, that’s why this system is especially beneficial to multi-client installations.
