The challenge: The medical and pharmaceutical industries rank among the world’s fastest-growing. With its ratiopharm products, the company has demonstrated for many years how to earn money in the generic pharmaceuticals market.
To meet the growing market demand for fast and flexible delivery, the company had to boost the performance and efficiency of its distribution system to an unprecedented level. Top priorities for the company’s logistics service provider Transpharm were a higher level of standardization in both large and small orders as well as automated materials flow and, as a result, a warehouse that didn’t require a forklift.
Our solution: As general contractor in logistics for Transpharm, we implemented a fully automated distribution center with an output of 1,000 pallets per day. The solution separates the production logistics from the distribution logistics, standardizes order processing, reduces order throughput times and boosts operational flexibility as well as productivity. By shortening the order picking paths and optimizing the routing of shipping cartons, the system handles 100,000 picks per day, and manages all of this with a minuscule error quota. At the same time, process quality is improved, for example, by weight checks of each pick right at the pick location.
An important project component was the integration of the entire product flow into the SAP R/3 logistics software. By linking these two worlds - ERP and warehouse management - Transpharm benefits from high investment protection, minimum system management costs and maximum operational reliability.
Benefits for ratiopharm Group:
- Meeting each customer’s individual requirements
- Ergonomic job design in the order picking, shipping and warehousing areas
- High efficiency, for example by using order picking carts to pick the original cartons automatically in the high-bay storage and then load the shelves automatically
- High operational flexibility through customized order picking techniques
- High transparency through complete integration into the process chain
- Flexible expansion capability of warehouse, transport and order picking capacity
