Features/Benefits Provided: Horizontal Carousels Reduced Operating Expenses and Increased Throughput for Distribution Center. Storage Density Increased by 50% and Inventory by 40% While Producing Higher Pick Rates.

Pressure to reduce health care costs is an ever-present reality. A children's and woman's health center and four other health care facilities combined resources to respond in a significant way. They consolidated their medical supply warehousing activities under a central warehouse. This facility has become the central receiving, storage and distribution point for all non-pharmaceutical supplies for the hospitals. To distribute higher volumes from its modest - and not expandable - 12,000 sq. ft. warehouse space, the hospitals elected to automate by installing a horizontal carousel system. The system is comprised of four carousels with 50 carriers, two pick-light towers, plus put lights on the workstation and an inventory management software package.

The carousels store 70% of SKUs handled by the warehouse, including bandages, needles, gauze, laboratory devices, catheters, masks, respiratory devices, etc., stored in totes and cartons. Prior to the consolidation and automation, the distribution center picked entirely manually from shelves and racks via paper pick lists. The facility couldn't have served the other health care facilities without the high storage density and the rapid pick rate provided by the carousel system. There wasn't enough floor space available to house all the existing and new SKUs on shelves and racks, especially in the volumes required. And they couldn't have picked fast enough. The carousel system throughput improved by as much as 500%. While the manual pick rate, then and now, is only 35 or 40 lines an hour, the pick rate from the carousel system is 150 to 200 lines an hour.

Only a single picker operates the workstation at the end of the four-carousel cluster. Picking is rapid because supplies are brought to the picker, rather than the picker walking to the supplies. While batch picking, the carousels stay several picks ahead of the operator, automatically turning via the shortest path to pre-position and present the correct carriers for picking. The picker doesn't need to wait for a carrier. Pick light towers tell the worker which shelf on which carrier to pick from, and the quantity to assure maximum accuracy.

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