Fully serviced in Europe
Fully serviced in Europe LOGISTICS Beumer Group installed the entire conveying, picking and sortation technology for car parts dealer Inter Cars S. A. at its new European Logistics Centre (ELC) near Warsaw. This includes a warehouse control system (WCS) that manages the entire material flow. Optimizing throughput and minimizing costs, Inter Cars gets its spare parts now even faster to workshops and customers all across Europe. For this project, the system supplier has permanently stationed employees on site as part of its residential service. “Inter Cars was one of the most important projects for us to successfully complete in Poland,” Sandra Lückmann sums up. She is business development manager at Beumer Group in Beckum, Germany, and was responsible for the successful handling of this order. What was remarkable: “As system integrator, we designed and installed the entire conveying, picking and sortation technology for the spare parts dealer at its European logistics centre, including our WCS, that controls the inbound area, quality assurance, picking and shipping.” Spare parts distributor with potential Inter Cars is one of the leading spare parts distributors for passenger cars, transport vehicles and trucks. The company, headquartered in Poland, has more than one hundred subsidiaries and branches spread all across the Baltic states and the Balkans. In addition, there is a nationwide network of approximately a thousand workshops. The previous logistics centre in Czosnów, Poland, supplied smaller 24 WORLD OF INDUSTRIES 1/2019
distribution centres all over Europe who then supplied the workshops and customers. The increasing number of stored and delivered parts however started to exceed its capacities. The managers decided to build a new automated European logistics centre in Zakroczym, approx. 30 km from Warsaw. The in-house logistics provider ILS was commissioned as general contractor – “and this is how we got involved as system supplier of intralogistics solutions”, says Sandra Lückmann. “At the end of 2013, ILS called our Polish subsidiary. At the time, the project was still in its design phase. We only knew how many parts needed to be sorted in a given period of time.” Up to seven million products In January of 2015, Beumer Group got awarded the contract, installation started in September of 2015, and the start-up process began the following September, with completion in December. Inter Cars closed the previous logistics centre at the end of 2016, the new European logistics centre started fully operating in May 2017. “There are currently stores around 7 million pieces like spark plugs, brake disks, V-belts, batteries, but also more bulky parts, like exhausts and hoods, basically everything needed for cars,” explains Lückmann. The complex is comprised of four buildings, the largest one with 40,000 m², ten metres in height. It is equipped with a fourstory shelving rack. The other buildings are 5,000 m². Here they store tyres and hazardous material, such as oils and varnishes, that must be kept separate due to fire protection measures. The products are divided into different clusters, similar to clothing sizes into S, M and XL and XXL, depending on dimension and weight. “Items are picked in two stages,” describes Lückmann. With a set number of totes placed on a trolley, the employee drives along the aisles of the shelves, collecting all the components displayed on the hand-held scanner. The small and medium parts are taken out of the shelves in batches, consolidating multiple orders into one picking wave. The totes are then placed on the roller conveyor and transported automatically to the packing sorter. “Depending on the WORLD OF INDUSTRIES 1/2019 25
