Brief introduction of the client
Sentronic is a company since 1993 for optical instruments and equipment for monitoring and measuring chemical and biological data. The company is located in Dresden, Germany and operates in two sectors – Spectroscopy and Sensors. While the former is mainly oriented towards the pharmaceutical, chemical and food industries, the latter is aimed more at the general public, with their main product being smart optical sensors.
Goals of the project
The main objective of the project is the complete automation of the warehouse and production processes, which will allow efficient and skilful use of raw materials and resources, full traceability of the finished product to the end customer, optimization of the activities of the users of the system and transparency of data in the preparation of reports and logs.
The challenges
Project implementation requires synchronization at many levels and with different systems that the client uses in its operations:
- Creation, distribution and setting of internal commodity groups by type and automatic generation of an item code according to a special algorithm consisting of a prefix, suffix and an internal part depending on certain factors (date of entry, location in the warehouse, variant, release) and a check number.
- Create recipes for production that are variants (the same item with or without different modules) and releases (a new series of all the variants created so far + the main one). The difficulty comes from customizing each recipe and creating unique numbers for each variant, respectively release, again having an algorithm derived to generate their numbers.
Project Description
For the implementation of the project, the standard WMS system StoreIT was used and adapted to Sentronic’s warehousing and production activities. The project covers the following modules and functionalities:
- Receipt of products, production parts, technical equipment and packaging materials with delivery orders entered in the system
- Warehousing of products, parts for production technical equipment and packaging materials in the respective warehouse areas with functionality for automatic search of warehouse locations according to set criteria
- Organizing the production and management activities of the assembly lines, taking into account the specifically selected formulation and commodity group to which the item belongs, and taking delivery of the goods in the correspondingly selected warehouse area or area corresponding to its commodity group
- Packaging and palletising of finished products at the end of the production line
- Preparing to ship customer orders with functionality to complete entire single or mixed pallets
The implementation
The project commenced with a brief discussion and the creation of a working specification in June 2019 and was commissioned productively at client Sentronic in April 2020.