Gardiners is a UK distributor of global footwear and workwear brands to the retail trade. The investment in its logistics building has tripled the company’s warehousing capacity to a total of 230,000 sq. ft.
Gardiner Brothers is said to handle in excess of 10,000 product lines of shoes and clothing with high profile brands including Hushpuppies, Caterpillar, Skechers and Hunter. Gardiners appointed the CKF Systems team to provide their automated system solution, capable of delivering the performance necessary for the next phase of its expansion.
Designed, manufactured and installed by CKF, the system operates on four levels, ground floor level and across three mezzanine floors in the new warehouse. Tote bins are used as the transfer medium for the manually picked shoes and clothing. Pick stations, with an accumulation of tote bins are located at each floor for order fulfilment, manually picked from adjacent storage racking.
The system on each floor is connected with three vertical spiral conveyors. The efficient combination – one featuring a twin conveyor on a common inner support – provides the system layout with a continuous recirculating system across all floors for the full and empty tote bins.
The installed system comprises approximately 500m of modular conveying and includes CKF’s range of ZPA accumulation and 24V transport modular conveyor sections utilising the Interroll DC platform. The ZPA conveyors provide individually controlled zones and zero pressure accumulation of tote bins, while the transport conveyors provide a cost-effective conveying medium over long distances. Flowsort Diverter conveyor switches are integrated strategically to provide the tote/order intralogistics routing between the pick and packing stations throughout the system.
On the ground floor, a recirculating carousel system feeds the filled tote bins to a series of packing lanes. Prioritisation of the tote order to a designated lane, where the contents are removed and packed, provides the Gardiners operational team with a flexible automated packing solution. Empty tote bins are re-designated and returned onto the recirculating system ready for the fulfilment of new orders.
IFM vision camera barcode readers together with tote bin unique bar codes provide the task data flow. CKF Engineers used an SQL database as the interface between the Siemens PLC and the Oracle Factory Management System. The database provides tote bin tracking and defines the tote order routing to the pick and pack destinations. The system has the capability and flexibility of managing the live order of single and multiple items across one or more tote bins.
The master control cabinet on the ground floor houses the Siemens 1516F PLC, with remote operator panels on each of the Mezzanine floors each fitted with Siemens HMI interfaces. The safety system is managed through Pilz safety relays.
Employees have reduced manual handling in the warehouse, with improving working conditions and safety.