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There’s a lot of buzz surrounding AutoStore. In less than 20 years, this Norwegian-headquartered public company (OSE: AUTO) has achieved nearly $650 million in revenue. The company continued to grow even during the coronavirus pandemic, even as the industry contracted. And their revenue does not include services, they work through system integration partners.
Medline was the first company in the U.S. to adopt the AutoStore robotic order fulfillment solution and is the largest AutoStore user in the world. Medline has deployed more than 1,700 robots at 20 locations. The latest implementation, to be named at the end of March, will be at Medline’s facility in Willmar, Texas.
Medline is a medical supplies manufacturer, distributor, and solutions provider. Medline has annual revenues of more than $21 billion and is headquartered in Northfield, Illinois. Medline continues his 56th consecutive year of year-over-year growth. Medline is the largest supplier of clinical supply chain services to medical-surgical facilities in the United States. The company’s customers include large hospital systems, clinics, surgical centers, and long-term care facilities.
The customers Medline serves range from very large facilities to home health patients. The company has made significant investments in its supply chain. Even before the pandemic hit, Steve Miller, Medline’s executive vice president of supply chain, said the healthcare giant was making “highly focused capital investments in what we call ‘healthcare resiliency initiatives.’ We were running a campaign.” And through it all, we’ve reinvested more than $2 billion in our manufacturing footprint, distribution footprint, technology and systems to ensure continued high resiliency. ”
Medline’s first AutoStore went live in 2013. Daniel Schwartz, vice president of engineering at Medline, describes the solution as a dense grid structure with bins stacked on top of each other containing product. “It’s like a big 4D Rubik’s Cube.” Robots are then placed on top of the grid, and their job is to make sure the right boxes go to the right places. ” The robot performs a combination of digging, reaching the underlying bins and moving them out of the way, and selecting the required bin. This is coordinated by software that controls this automatic storage and retrieval system. “That software is really his AutoStore secret sauce.”
Why Auto Store?
Back in late 2011, “we knew we were reaching a tipping point,” Schwartz explained. The number of lines of case picking they are doing in his day is rapidly increasing, and he wonders if it will impact his ability to meet next-day service commitments amid an already tight workload. I was concerned. Medline needed automation to accommodate growth.
Medline conducted an exhaustive search and selected AutoStore. SwissLog was chosen as the implementation partner and source for the warehouse management software that links AutoStore to Medline’s warehouse management system. What makes Medline so happy with this solution is the combination of both the Swisslog software and the “robustness of the AutoStore design.”
AutoStore is a multi-million dollar advanced automation solution. The exact amount depends on other accessories installed together, such as additional transportation, mezzanines, number of pick stations, etc.
What were the results?
Throughput has improved. Speeds vary depending on the type of orders being processed, but picking throughput typically increases by a factor of 2 to 4. And this is in addition to its already strong picking ability.
This system has proven to be reliable. There is almost no downtime. Medline believes this is due to the limited number of failure points within the system.
Although this solution is not as flexible as autonomous mobile robots, it is more flexible than other forms of bolted-down heavy automation. “In fact, across our 20 deployments, we’ve made four to five enhancements to these systems,” Schwartz said. You can add pick stations, you can add robots, you can expand the grid.”
Flexibility is not only based on being able to extend the solution modularly. It’s the flexibility to provide a complete continuum of care to customers of varying sizes and order depths. This customer mix also includes orders that include only one or two items for home delivery, a rapidly growing market. To support these low-volume orders, Medline customized the pick station design to support conveyance and made several software changes to the way orders are dropped into the system.
AutoStore also improves picking accuracy and safety, improves your ability to quickly warm up new workers, and even aids in worker retention. “One of the great things about the AutoStore technology, he said, is that this part of the distribution center is a “preferred place for team members to work,” Miller said.
“Workforce is not as scarce and plentiful as it once was. AutoStore’s technology allows companies to do more with less people, and training someone how to operate our systems is extremely difficult. “It’s easy,” said Paul Roy, AutoStore’s vice president and managing director of North America. “Some customers have told us that it would take him two weeks to train him to pick items in the aisle, but with our system, he can be trained in hours.”
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