Logistics and Warehouse Management

 

Two large corporations are utilizing the Dynasty Development Environment to run large logistics management applications.

Warehouse Administration System

The Warehouse Administration System supports a distribution centre for paint products. It includes an interface to a SAP system with incoming goods and delivery orders information data exchange.

The received goods from the nearby paint factory are identified, counted and stored in a highbay warehouse with a total of over 33000 storage locations in eight aisles with automatic cranes. The paint products in bins, buckets, barrels and even containers are stocked on pallets and moved by automatic conveyors and robotized forklift trucks guided by transport orders shown on radio frequency data communication terminals.

A conventional picking warehouse with a total of 5530 locations beside the highbay warehouse contains 2400 articles for picking purpose and is supplied from the highbay warehouse. Delivery orders are grouped to several shipments during the day by the order preparation staff and retrieval and picking orders are produced for each shipment with the necessary quantities of the requested goods. Heavy products are picked on 4 special picking stations on the conveyor supplied from the highway warehouse and the other picking is performed by 20 trucks in the conventional picking warehouse. The prepared shipments pallets are collected on shipment lanes for loading when the cargo truck arrives.

The whole organization of the distribution center is controlled by clients and background programs developed with the Dynasty Development Environment. The clients programs provides a wide range of informational overviews of the shipment preparation process and also for the whole administration.

Items are:

  • Warehouse administration system user administration
  • Operational messages maintenance
  • Common data administration
  • Warehouse structure maintenance
  • Incoming goods handling
  • Order grouping for shipment
  • Order picking
  • Shipment control and confirmation
  • Stock and inventory administration
  • Internal transport maintenance
  • Radio frequency data communication administration
  • Statistics overview
  • Contingency organization

Backend programs runs on IBM AIX servers providing the organization and the control of the material flow within the distribution centre. An SAP interface is used for the incoming goods and the delivery orders and also for the confirmation of the real processed quantities of these orders:

  • Selecting suitable storage locations in the highway warehouse for pallets depending on the articles hazardous goods classification
  • Activation of transports when it is time and there is room for at the internal destination are event driven tasks
  • Generating retrieval transports and picking orders for shipment pallets after order grouping
  • Printing the shipment documents
  • Starting retrieval transports and picking orders of a shipment at the scheduled time.

Chemical Product Management

The 2nd project has been implemented for the control of storage and retrieval of chemical products in several warehouse locations at the production site. The main focus is to give a graphical overview of a total of 9525 storage locations in several warehouse locations to the controlling staff. Lot quantities of articles are low, and space is short on site. There are only few shelf locations; most storage rows are on the ground. The defined storage rows cannot be reserved for lot numbers of an article without spoiling space, so the application allows mixed article storage within storage rows.

A detailed overview of the storage occupation is provided by a top plan view of the storage locations and different colored locations depending on the reservation state. The goods in bags, barrels, big bags and containers are stacked on pallets and the product quantities are stored on the locations.

The application has an interface to a SAP system, which provides storage and retrieval transport orders. The controlling staff can accept storage proposals of the application or select the storage locations manually. After the storage location selection and reservation, the controlling staff prints the transport orders for the forklift trucks. The forklift drivers confirm the processed transports on their own screens in the warehouses and SAP is informed about it.

Due to the mixed article storage within a storage row, some rearrangements of the goods in the same storage row may become necessary, to get the requested article of a retrieval order. These rearrangements are automatically generated by the DDE application.

This application supports the storage location control of three controlling users for the management of the limited storage space at the site. The movements are processed with printed transport documents and a final confirmation.

Here are the program items:

  • Storage location reservation
  • Printing storage transports
  • Confirming storage transports
  • Retrieval location reservation
  • Printing rertieval transports
  • Confirming retrieval transports
  • Final retrieval confirmation
  • Rearrangement location reservation
  • Printing rearrangement transports
  • Confirming rearrangement transports
  • Inventory handling
  • Article maintenance
  • Storage location maintenance
  • Order and location information

In this case there is a backend program on the Microsoft Windows server for the SAP interface for storage and retrieval transport orders.