Goods to man order picking system for pharmaceuticals at Picking Farma for 2.400 orders / day
Picking Farma, located in Santa Perpetua de Mogoda (Barcelona), Spain, is a third party logistics services provider (3PL) for the pharmaceutical industry. Vanderlande Industries has installed a goods to man based order picking system, Order Distribution System (ODS), with 8 workstations in Picking Farma’s new warehouse.
Picking Farma supplies medicines and ‘over-the counter’ (OTC) products to more than 40 clients in the pharmaceutical industry. The company recently opened a new 32,000 square metre warehouse, large enough to handle 2,400 orders per day. Vanderlande Industries’ Order Distribution System (ODS) concept was selected for order picking 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 ODS 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 suited to multi-client installations.