Impact on SCANIA - UNATA
Who doesn't know them, these Swedish road giants who transport goods on the world's motorways? SCANIA is an international company with no fewer than 49,000 employees worldwide, selling trucks, buses and engines for industry and the marine sector in 100 countries. UNATA is their partner for optimising and automating the preparation of spare parts orders. This external company invents, produces and implements customised solutions for industrial automation.
The situation
Every day, the SCANIA distribution centre in Opglabbeek dispatches some 32,000 orders, ranging from a small screw to an entire engine or truck cab. Any part of a SCANIA truck can be ordered here.
The Opglabbeek warehouses are divided into different zones. In order to be able to cover the generally long distance between them and the sorter with greater ease, speed and ergonomics, UNATA was entrusted with the task of developing the current trolley for batch picking.
The challenge
In this process, the role of the user is important, because batch order picking trolleys are operated manually. It is impossible to automate everything. The system sends the order picker a route through the warehouse, where the different zones deliver the orders in bins.
The trolley is loaded gradually and then travels to the sorter. In the end, the total distance covered is quite long. What's more, the weight of the (loaded) trolley cannot be underestimated: several hundred kilos if you add up the six 20-kilo bins on average and the weight of the trolley.
Transporting such a load around the warehouse is not an easy task. Given SCANIA's focus on ergonomics and safety, and the fact that productivity needed a major boost, the choice of a motorised wheel was an obvious one. And that's how TENTE came into play.
UNATA's engineers were quick to turn to TENTE. They knew the company and had already used the wheels frequently for a wide variety of applications. So the trust was already there. As a first step, TENTE supplied the requested e-Drive assembly kits to test them.
The control, the drive wheel, the battery: everything was integrated according to the regulations, where necessary in conjunction with TENTE's experts. After the necessary briefings and a long period of testing, the new batch order picking trucks were very well received in the field.
By the time the new trolley system was rolled out, most staff were already more or less familiar with it. As a result, the roll-out went off without a hitch.
"For many years now, TENTE's E-Drive wheels have been used to move order picking trolleys around SCANIA's vast halls in Oudsbergen, collecting spare parts for lorries and transporting them to the large sorting machine."
Ken Goossens, Warehouse Engineer Scania Parts Logistics
Thanks to our dual-motorised wheels (e-Drive Twin), 15 batch order-picking trucks for 6 bins are now circulating in SCANIA's warehouses, as well as 6 pallet trucks capable of transporting one euro pallet at a time and carrying up to 800 kilos. A solution welcomed with open arms by users. Thanks to an in-depth analysis of the existing situation, we were able to find a suitable mobility solution for SCANIA-UNATA. We can do the same for you!
Request your mobility study now and calculate with us how your company can manage internal goods transport faster, more efficiently and more safely. Discover the impact TENTE can have on your business and increase ease of use with TENTE mobility solutions.
