Creo Customer: System Logistics Tightens Up the Warehouse

By LINDSEY CHRISTENSEN | Published: DEC 14, 2011

When I think about warehouse operations, I think guys with clipboards checking inventory and the incessant beep-beep-beeeeep of forklifts backing up. But it seems those images are outdated. In fact, almost nothing about how products are managed from manufacture to your local store is what it used to be.

Take Coca Cola, for example. At one time, Coke had just a few different products. It would load pallets of single products on its trucks, and the driver would “pick” each order from the truck on delivery.  A couple cases of Coke, some Sprite, a few cases of Dr. Pepper, and so on.

That seemed to work just fine until the company began expanding its offerings. Coca Cola now bottles water, juices, teas, as well as a variety of soda products. All together, the company boasts a portfolio of 3500 products! Suddenly, it’s not so practical to ask a driver to pull a few cases of this and couple cartons of that when there may be dozens and dozens of different products to deliver to each retailer.

In the United States, Coca Cola began replacing its familiar side-loading vehicles with “order fulfillment system” trucks. These trucks are set up to carry each customer order in carts. The driver simply unloads a single cart—which may include dozens of different products—for each stop on the delivery route.

And who packs those carts full of individualized orders?

That’s where Systems Logistics comes in. We’ve featured Systems in a couple previous posts, so you may be familiar with Systems picking and packing automation. Coca Cola uses Systems Logistics technology for its warehouse operations, picking and packing orders with tight precision and speed. So fulfilling an order for 50 different products isn’t much more expensive than fulfilling an order with 3 different SKUs. All without enlisting the delivery driver or a beeping forklift.

Well, at least not in this video from The Product Design Show, in which Allison and Vince describe the Systems technology—and the CAD software used to create it, Creo.