Safer, smarter and faster: automation delivers at Coca-Cola’s Brisbane warehouse

Following an open request for tenders for an automated warehousing and palletising system for its 30,000m² distribution centre in Brisbane, Queensland, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Australia (CCEP) chose a solution from SSI Schaefer.

Working closely with CCEP, SSI Schaefer created a concept that matched Coca-Cola’s priorities for the site of having a flexible, agile and accurate system that supported the delivery profile of the business as well as the storage capacity and necessary throughput. Providing a system that met the company’s safety culture was also a priority. The concept integrated both case picking with bulk storage and delivers a flexible system, with both high utilisation and availability, picking more than 2.5 million cases annually.

“SSI Schaefer were very collaborative as we moved through the design,” said Anthony Lee, Project Manager Major Works for CCEP. “They brought a lot of their expertise that they gained from around the world in helping us develop this facility.”

The SSI Schaefer design features the company’s SSI Lift&Run technology, which provides high storage density at the same time as high throughput. The SSI Lift&Run high bay warehouse (HBW) receives full pallets via an airbridge directly from the adjacent bottling plant. The system provides for the automatic storage and retrieval of more than 30,000 pallets over seven levels and includes 12 SSI Lift&Run cranes in four aisles, as well as an extensive pallet conveyor system with multiple pallet lifts.

Adjacent to the SSI Lift&Run high bay warehouse, SSI Schaefer installed an automatic case picking (ACP) system. The proximity and direct link to the HBW enables automatic pallet replenishment direct from the HBW. Full pallets are conveyed to the ACP from the automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) where they are automatically delayered by a depalletising robot, case wheeler and Intralox case singulation. The individual cases are then stored directly in a 3-aisle SSI Cuby trayless shuttle case buffer system.

Required cases are sequenced out of the SSI Cuby case buffer to one of three robots for automatic palletising. The robot palletises the fastest moving top 30 SKUs for the CCEP’s route trade, and is designed to pick over 2.5 million cases annually.

All components are controlled by SSI Schaefer’s WAMAS warehouse control system, which interfaces directly to the on-site SAP host EWM system. This includes SSI SCHAEFER’s Schaefer Pack Pattern Generator (SPPG) module, which is responsible for building stable and dense pallets.

A key aspect to ensuring the best performance of the system is the SSI Resident Maintenance team, which not only maintains the equipment in direct consultation with CCEP, but also continues to optimise and improve reliability and throughput. Through SSI Schaefer’s computerised maintenance management system (CMMS), all actions by the maintenance team are captured and logged using handheld terminals, building up a database of root causes for all stoppages that then feeds into collaborative continuous improvement actions for the maintenance and operations teams.

The design provided CCEP with a compact yet resilient automated storage solution that allowed it to meet its goal of implementing a new warehouse on the production site, with an airbridge conveyor link directly from production. The solution met all of Coca-Cola’s requirements in terms of storage, throughput, expandability and redundancy.

Complete automation also means greater safety for workers, according to Emily Smeed, Inventory Manager for CCEP.

“It removes the need for a lot of forklift interaction, as well as the need for any manual handling. The more we are putting into the automation the less we are having to expose to our employees on the floor,” she said.

“SSI Schaefer was really committed to making sure the facility worked, and ultimately we have produced a facility that has some of the highest utilisation and availability that I have seen anywhere,” Lee added.