Solution Profile: Cross-docked facility for Canadian freight-handling company 115,000 sf material handling capacity Automation enables 300% growth in daily volume with 30% fewer personnel Provider: FKI Logistex

Andlauer Transportation Services (ATS®), Canadian freight-handling company founded in 1991, began with a simple idea: build a freight forwarding and shipping operation so efficient and so dedicated to service that customers would need only one transportation provider for all their needs.

Today, 15 years later and as part of a publicly listed income trust, ATS moves approximately 3.7 million pounds (1.7 million kilograms) of freight a day.

The ATS strategy is to provide whatever business-to-business freight service customers need, earning both their trust and their loyalty. In Montreal and Toronto, ATS focuses on the health care, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and retail industries. In regions that do not have concentrated industries, ATS has broadened its customer base by providing the same top-notch, customized service it provides to its niche customers to other market segments.

A Freight Handling Formula for Success
Achieving this intense customer loyalty can largely be attributed to Andlauer’s vision, but also to his foresight in adopting cross-docking as his core logistics methodology. With material handling automation technology from FKI Logistex®, ATS has so effectively employed cross-docking that it has quickly scaled up to meet its high-volume, high-service levels and the competitive challenges of the on-time delivery market.

Evidence of this successful blend of technology and service is in ATS’ new Montreal-area cross-docked facility, where a $2.0 million USD ($2.5 million Canadian) investment in an automated FKI Logistex material handling system has enabled ATS to score massive productivity gains and an intense ROI.

Scaling Delivery Capacity with Material Handling Automation
Facilitating the intense shipping cycles at the core of ATS’ business is where cross-docking and material handling automation come in. ATS has found that cross-docking and the high-speed, PC-controlled package sortation system from FKI Logistex are the best ways to efficiently handle increasing freight volumes. Arriving packages move quickly in and out of ATS’ cross-docked depots with little time or space for storage or margin of error.

High-Speed Sorter Powers Growth in Montreal
Key to throughput levels achieved by ATS in Montreal is an FKI Logistex UniSort® XV sliding shoe sorter. Packages travel through the UniSort XV at very high speeds — 350 feet per minute (1.8 meters per second) — going left or right to their destination lane from the two-sided sorter. The UniSort system has a maximum throughput capacity of 8,400 pieces per hour — more than three times the capacity of the manual-sorting operation in the old facility, which processed 2,500 pieces per hour. With automation throughout the sorting process, accuracy is at 99.4 percent, and missed connections at other depots or the airport are almost nonexistent.

is a Proud Member of the CSS & AS/RS Product Sections of
Material Handling Industry of America

FKI Logistex
9301 Olive Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63132-3299
Tel: 1-877-935-4564
manufacturing@fkilogistex.com
www.fkilogistex.com