When reorganising your own warehouse, automatic warehouses (also called Vertical Lift Modules) can be the winning choice.
Their speciality is being able to make use of the full height of your building and therefore save a lot of floor space. Their taller vertical structure can reach up to 16 metres and allow you to recover up to 90% of floor space.
Vertical tray warehouses allow you to store goods in an organised, clean, secure and fast system, reducing the number of movements operators have to make and avoiding damage to your goods.
Products are brought directly to the picking bay using the “goods to man” principle. This means that operators don’t have to move around the warehouse to pick or refill goods.
In this way, gone will be those hazardous situations in which operators are moving around traditional warehouses and accessing racking, shelving or mezzanines via ladders or forklifts.
These solutions allow you to have more efficient stock management and a big reduction in errors. When combined with management software, the warehouse is able to keep track of all incoming and outgoing goods, providing constant control over your stock situation and improving stock management.
You can have real-time information about the state of the warehouse, and this is very useful for optimising re-orders and the logistics of your production process. Moreover, each time goods are stored or retrieved, the operator is given clear indications about theoretical stock levels and can compare these with real stock levels and facilitate their alignment in the event of an inventory.
To further increase precision in stock management within your warehouse and reduce errors, simple and intuitive visual aids are available (laser pointer, alphanumeric bar). Any operator can use these devices to easily identify products that are to be picked from or refilled into the VLM, even without any special skills.
Some types of VLM can also limit access by operators to an individual machine or particular trays. Access can be allowed to authorised operators only (using badges or passwords) and can be tracked. This is very useful where valuable goods or sensitive documents are being stored.