¿What if one day you arrive at a supermarket and you can’t find the product you were looking for? ¿ Could it be the case that the store received a claim that it can’t cover? ¿A birthday, a company dinner, an informal ceremony at home likes a christening or a wedding?
When I had to find a high demand market or sector without any doubt I decided to analyse the food market, since it must cover a basic and daily need, and I couldn’t imagine how it would be to organize its inventory, so I found it an interesting case.
As a reference I’ve chosen Mercadona as it is a leader in the supermarket sector and I think this could be due to its logistics. I read an article that said that it has a robot warehouse. Its handler’s manipulators now are supervising machines that perform the tasks that they themselves performed previously. In a traditional warehouse, the employee with a list of orders selects the different products distributed along the shelves.
In contrast, with this type of warehouse Mercadona has managed to create the first multi-reference pallets, that is to say, of mixed products. 70% of these pallets go directly to the store, such as products of great rotation like water or toilet paper, while the remaining 30%, is handled in this plant to be able to make tetrix pallets with the required products for the 300 stores that should serve in total. These pallets can be built thanks to the warehouse receiving the orders by order of shipment from the establishment, and are placed respectively. For Mercadona, as for many companies, transporting air is very expensive, and therefore it tries to fit it in the best way.
The process that follows the goods when they enter the warehouse is the following one: they are identified by a computer, placed on the pallets that will never leave the warehouse, and are distributed along the shelves depending on the type of food or temperature it needs, among other factors until it is ready to be sent to the corresponding store.
For the inventory in the stores, have been installed systems called Linux, which are responsible for managing the products by detecting the necessary quantities of each food, and sending a notification of this automatically to the distributor. Once this is done, when the product reaches the store it is entered into the inventory through the bar code and placed on the shelves, minimizing the quantities that will remain in the store warehouse. When a product is passed by box, it is automatically deducted from the inventory.
Mercadona achieved this by visiting different logistic centres around the world and selecting from each of them the technology that caught their attention. Thanks to this, it is the first company in Europe that has managed to unite the entire supply chain with machines, except with cosmetic products, because of its size. In addition, it doesn’t keep your goods for more than two days in your warehouses and for this very reason, avoid encountering a stock break.
As a conclusion, I think that Mercadona follows one of the best inventory strategies by understanding and considering the demand products characteristics and their complexity when making the orders.
If you have been wanting more, I encourage you to see this video in which you can see the robot warehouse facilities:
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario