The Streck Transport Group is a medium-sized forwarding and logistics service provider with a large number of locations in Germany and Switzerland. Streck Transport provides the entire range of forwarding and logistics services. Long-standing cooperations, such as with System Alliance, System Alliance Europe, SystemPlus and DPD, form the basis for nationwide services.
The Möhlin location in the canton of Aargau is the largest branch of the company group in Switzerland. From here, customers in Switzerland, Europe and all over the world have been served since 1977.
At the Möhlin site, the available storage space was expanded in 2008 with a new building. A total of about 17,000 pallet spaces are now available in two spatially separated halls, as well as various block storage areas and sufficient space for incoming and outgoing goods. Manually operated narrow-aisle stackers are used in the high-bay warehouses. The transports on the area, the supply and disposal of the high-bay warehouses and the operation of the block warehouses are carried out by front stackers.
The distribution of the load carriers to the dispatch locations is supported by an underfloor drag chain conveyor. As part of the expansion, the existing warehouse management system was replaced by the modern SuPCIS-L8 warehouse management system from S&P Computersysteme GmbH, Stuttgart. The warehouse management system (WMS) runs on a redundant server cluster in the Streck Transport Group's central computer centre in Freiburg. The desktop clients at the Swiss location in Möhlin are connected via the intranet using Citrix. The radio data terminals used, which run the Java Frontend with graphical user interface developed by S&P, communicate directly with the LVS server via XML.
As a logistics service provider, the Streck Transport Group serves many clients from a wide range of industries, from food to automotive. The requirements for process support by the warehouse management system are correspondingly demanding. Depending on the client, the dialogues and corresponding mandatory fields such as batch, production date, best before date, etc. are called up. This significantly simplifies the work in goods receipt. If open requirements are known in the system, the employees can directly serve the shipping department with the mobile terminal via a bypass function. The necessary documents are called up via the radio data transmission terminal on request, which can be set on a client-specific basis.
The requirement for intelligent and efficient control of the vehicles in use was taken into account by the forklift guidance system integrated in SuPCIS-L8. Route optimisation, individual aisle occupation strategies with corresponding aisle blocks for different vehicle types with dynamic traffic control guarantee smooth operations in the warehouse. The warehouse control centre can track every movement in real time.
A continuous dialogue-guided, transparent solution was developed from all storage areas for picking the differently procured warehouse goods. When picking outside the aisle, a restocking order for the remaining quantity on the load carrier is automatically generated by the WMS. The control takes place via a special indicator in the article master.
As a provider of logistics services, the requirements for an individual but automatic calculation of the services provided were high. The flexibility to use individual logistical processes as the service type for the calculation basis enables client-specific logistics accounting.
The project was intensively supported by the project management team of the Streck Transport Group. A sophisticated test plan was drawn up and worked through.
At the end of February 2009, the WMS was commissioned and the trial operation was subsequently released in several stages parallel to ongoing operations. Other logistics locations of the Streck Transport Group in Germany will follow.
