In recent months, a highly-automated logistics center was built for H. H. Beteiligungs-GmbH in the Tyrolean town of Polling. This company is the parent of Servus Handels- und Verlags-GmbH, which operates a mail order business under the brand name of 'Personalshop' in Austria. Distribution is handled via online shopping, catalogs, as well as seven stores. The business’s high growth rates together with their sophisticated multichannel mix has resulted in restructuring of the intralogistics system.
Personalshop has been granting special purchasing conditions to Austrian trade union members and employees of large companies and institutions since 1994. Servus, its parent, has been highly successful with this business concept and is expanding activities to Germany, Holland, and Switzerland.
Software competence for highly automated solutions
Servus’s high growth rates and the multi-channel mix for supplying end customers, stores, and wholesalers has finally necessitated the restructuring of the existing intralogistics system. A possible expansion of the company’s headquarters in Mutters, Tyrol, was too difficult due to the location of the company premises, which is why a more suitable area needed to be found, which eventually happened in Polling only a few kilometers away, and as part of intensive greenfield planning. In close cooperation with Servus, TGW built the first FlashPick® system in Austria – which turned out to be an extremely powerful and state-of-the-art customized solution.
The TGW Software Suite manages and controls all processes of the company’s complex intralogistics system – from goods receipt to dispatch. At the core of the challenge was the efficient linking of manual with highly automated warehouse areas. The software solution was tailored to the individual needs of Servus, and ramp-up was successfully completed in time for the Christmas season, a very important time of the business year.
The intralogistics solution consists of a two-aisle high-bay pallet warehouse in silo design, a shuttle warehouse with four aisles as well as eight picking and four packaging workstations. The highly efficient Stingray shuttles take care of storage and delivery at lightning speed. The piggyback solution used together with the goods-to-person picking system ensures fast re-stocking and amazing efficiency.
The system: Flexible and scalable
Delivered goods are transported either to the pallet high-bay warehouse or the block warehouse, or they are repacked into containers and stored in the shuttle warehouse. Customer orders with shuttle-capable articles are sent to one of the eight picking workstations. Customer orders that receive inserts, for example for gifts, are sent to the so-called Top 5 workstations.
“TGW has implemented the first FlashPick® system in Austria for Servus Handels- und Verlags-GmbH. For our customer, this is by far the largest investment in the history of their company,” says Christoph Wolkerstorfer, CSO of the TGW Logistics Group. “With our flexible, scalable solution, Servus is ideally outfitted for future growth and can expand quickly and easily, if necessary.”
