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Food Distribution Center Planning – Best Practices

Who doesn’t enjoy eating at their favorite restaurant, driving through their favorite fast-food restaurant, making a meal at home, or just snacking away on the couch.  Without any research, I think it is safe to say that most everyone likes to eat!

In addition to logistics and systems studies, St. Onge Company supports getting food through the supply chain by assessing and designing food & beverage distribution centers.  This blog shares insights on recent operational and automation trends.

Unloading & Receiving

Historically, the majority of inbound receipts were full pallets, but in recent years this has shifted to more partial pallet receipts.  This creates additional handling and requires more space on the dock to stage trailer loads.

Many food companies use lumper services for unloading (and loading) as an approach to save truck drivers time and give them the ability to rest.  A lumper service might be hired by the receiver or shipper and is a third-party provider / workers that help to unload (and load) the freight from a trailer.

A few ideas for improvement within Unloading / Receiving:

  • Provide enough dock space and clear staging lanes to unload entire trailer load
  • Manage process with Warehouse Management System (WMS)
    • Utilize ASN (Advanced shipping notices)
    • Utilize RF scanning to track pallets into staging lanes
    • Utilize RF units to receive against PO or ASN

Put-away & Storage

The storage areas account for the majority of square footage within a typical food distribution facility.  This likely includes Ambient, Cooler and Freezer storage rooms/areas.  The utilization of this storage space is critical for all areas, but especially the Coolers and Freezer which have the highest operating costs.

The put-away process is integral to ensuring the highest utilization of the storage locations and overall warehouse space.  The best strategy is a random storage philosophy within each of the storage temperatures, and with consideration of other product quality constraints.

Additional specific improvements for put-away and storage areas:

  • Profiling product inventory levels with the optimum rack type (single, double deep, and deeper lane storage equipment options).
  • Aisle widths considerations from wide (144 inch) to very narrow aisles (66 inch) to increase storage density. And, utilization of required lift trucks to operate in aisles.  The sweet spot for many is a stand-up narrow aisle reach truck using at 9’-6” to 10’-6” aisles.
  • WMS director put-away matching product storage rules/constraints with available storage locations.
  • Crane-Based (ASRS) Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems to leverage additional vertical storage heights (reaching 100+ feet) and narrower aisles (~54 inches), and with no labor requirements for put-away and retrieval processes.
  • Pallet shuttle systems for an alternative AS/RS that works well in lower clear height operations (~50 feet), and provides the same no labor requirements for storage/retrieval.

Order Picking

Customer order picking consumes the majority of labor cost within the warehouse.  The most common conventional design is an order picker using a pallet rider, navigating the warehouse to pick cases from pallets stored in the lower pallet rack levels and decked positions onto a pallet.  The need for picking units from a full case, called ’repack’ for many in the food industry, is a necessity for many food service distributors.  With this requirements, a conventional approach is to use a pick cart, and/or tugger to pull multiple carts through the repack aisles.

The key factors to operating an efficient order picking process is to have the right pick media, best material handling equipment and quality product slotting.  As business grows and expands with new product offerings, vendor packaging design changes, and/or velocity fluctuations, these factors must be designed with flexibility, expandability and be constantly evaluated.

Some tips for developing an efficient order picking operations, beyond the conventional strategies:

  • Multi-level pallet riders, enabling picking from a 2nd tier location above full pallet pick locations.
  • Multi-pallet riders, taking 2 to 3 pallets through the pick path using pallet rider.
  • Pick to voice to free hands from handling paper or RF units during case picking.
  • Batch pick multiple stops to pallets and using technology to direct pallet building by stop sections
  • Multi-level pick modules, integrating pick to conveyor, zone-route diverts, and a downstream sorter.
  • Integrating robotic palletizers and layer pick technology
  • Mini-load ASRS, case shuttle, and/or AMR systems for good to person automated solution.

Loading & Delivery

Loading trailers has been a big topic in many of our recent food distribution projects.  The trick is most of the creative loading ideas impact how orders are picked and delivered to customers.  The loading concepts are really a focus on making the delivery to customers easier for drivers, and speeding-up the process.

Food retailer and restaurant service deliveries are either palletized or case delivered.  Larger retailers have a single stop delivered on a full pallet, which is unloaded a regional DC, cross-docked location, and/or directly to the grocery store dock.  While, most food service and restaurant customers are ordering less than pallet quantities.

The less than full pallet stops/order quantities require case handling during the delivery process using hand trucks.  Most of the time, this is accomplished with picking multi-stops to a single pallet, and the driver manually identifying the cases per stop during the delivery process.  Some companies direct the separation of stops onto the pallet into ‘sections’ to make this an easier process.

There is an interest in using quarter-pallets or returnable carts to keep smaller single stops together on a unit load, and reduce the handling of cases during the delivery process.   This impacts how an order is picked, and possibly handled on the shipping dock.  There are also potential trade-offs involving trailer cube utilization, which ‘drives’ most transportation managers.  Some considerations when evaluating the loading and delivery strategy:

  • Customer service requirements – define what the customer need / wants? Then, evaluate the design considerations and costs for providing what the customer needs.
  • Define your final delivery requirements and how this impacts picking, loading and trailer utilization? Single stop pallets, multi-stop organized pallets, single-stop quarter pallets, single stop carts, etc..
  • Investigate in technology to segregate multi-stops on pallets.
  • Utilize scanning with any pallet dock merging, dock staging, loading and during the delivery process.

Improving operational efficiency is important within any facility but has a greater impact in cold storage warehouses.  Cold storage space is more costly to operate, and uncomfortable to work in for long periods of time!  The tips provided within this Blog may help you identify some improvements, and keep the food flowing to your customers!
 
—Norm Saenz, St. Onge Company
 
 

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We have been named to Inc. Magazine’s annual Best Workplaces list for the second year in a row! Featured in the May/June 2024 issue, the list is the result of a comprehensive measurement of American companies that have excelled in creating exceptional workplaces and company culture, whether operating in a physical or a virtual facility.

From thousands of entries, we are one of only 535 companies honored.

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