A global beverage company needs more warehouse capacity – without building more space. Sound impossible? Have no fear…

Here’s What Happened
A global beverage company needed to expand its warehousing capacity. Rather than bare the high cost of building expansion, they chose to utilize robotics to implement an automated storage and retrieval system to better utilize existing space.

The challenge was that the project had to be completed in a very tight time frame to meet the company’s upcoming peak season production demands. The customer had purchased robotic hardware from a company in the US, but the software to control the system was written by another company in Europe. Customizing the software became problematic when they discovered that the software was not written in English and the company IT staff could not read the source code.

This Is Where We Come In
While the customer worked on building storage racks to squeeze extra capacity into the existing warehouse footprint, the ClearWave Crew took responsibility for managing the European code base and creating highly customized logic for product storage. We wrote language translators that parsed through the source code and translated the code, variables, and notes into English. Then, we customized the code to allow the operational logic to fit the client’s needs, maximizing product throughput and matching pallet-based product heights to appropriate levels and racks. Finally, the Crew wrote a full warehouse simulator to allow the client to work with the storage logic and optimize throughput and density before deploying to the live warehouse.

The simulator allowed the customer to observe their storage logic in real time and make adjustments in a few days- rather than the months needed previously. The customer can now run thousands of pallets a day through the system with robotic carts moving product in and out simultaneously without human intervention. Furthermore, they are able to exceed their density goals achieving an overall compaction of 93% and up to 99% in some rows.

We Can Help You Save the Day if any of these aspects of this organization’s story are true for you too:

• You need to build warehouse space- and can’t solve the problem by building new physical capacity
• You have some legacy code, but no one knows what to do with it
• You need a software system in place now, in time to meet your peak season demands – not later, after it’s over and you failed to deliver what your company needed
• You have good people working for you, but none of you can figure out how to create more hours in the day to get it all done- you need a system to help make the most of the resources already in place

ClearWave Software – We’re Not Your Ordinary Software Company