The challenge: First-class logistics for first-class products is now the standard at Huawei Technologies, a worldwide manufacturer of IT network products. In the past, the company had used manual warehousing and logistics for the roughly 13,000 different components it handles. Not surprisingly, this resulted in low productivity and a high error rate.
Huawei invested in a new logistics system that had to be flawless - a world-class solution to provide a high degree of accuracy and efficiency while also ensuring the lowest possible life-cycle costs. In other words, it had to deliver the maximum return on the investment.
Our solution: We worked together with Huawei to develop a warehousing and materials flow solution perfectly suited to the fast growth of this industry. An existing building some 300 meters away from the products was modified to accommodate an ASRS storage and order-picking facility with some 23,000 pallets and 42,000 bins.
A showcase of this facility is the pallet and bin order pick area. Goods are retrieved from both the pallet and bin ASRS, order-picked in kit requirements for production, palletized and transported 250 meters across an air bridge constructed to connect the warehouse and production building. Further savings were achieved through the highly efficient use of floor space in the existing building. In the past, 26,000 square meters (280,000 square feet) - nearly half of the production facility - had been required for warehousing purposes. Now all the logistics for the same quantity of products is handled within 13,000 square meters (140,000 square feet), in a seismically reinforced ASRS.
Benefits for Huawei:
- Reduction by 50% in required warehousing space
- Improvement in on-time/on-target deliveries from 96% to 99.5%
- Speed of registering received goods doubled versus manual acquisition
- No increase in operating costs despite substantially higher throughput
- Future savings in order handling as Huawei continues to grow
- Quick response capability through transparent materials flow
- Bilingual operation of warehouse administration and control in Chinese and English
- High degree of OH&S, ergonomics
- Redundancy at subsystem and equipment level provided to continue operations in event of particular failures
