Background
Founded in 1903 by German and British merchants, Tsingtao Brewery is one of the earliest breweries in China and is listed in Fortune 500. Tsingtao Brewery is now the fifth largest beer producer in the world, exporting products to more than 100 countries and regions. With more than 60 breweries and a massive amount of order shipments, Tsingtao Brewery has been seeking for automated intralogistics solutions to boost packaging and shipment efficiency.
Solution
Over 60 latent mobile robots and forklift mobile robots have been deployed in the packaging workshop of Tsingtao Brewery since 2019 to realize automated intralogistics processes across 3 floors. The automated intralogistics solution includes packaging material inbound delivery, warehousing, packaged beer outbound distribution and robotic arms feeding process. The solution also covers recycling packing materials, pallets and unqualified products.
The solution has planned several storage modes according to the inventory, specification and attachment of different types of packaging materials, such as single-layer storage rack for dense storage, multi-layer storage beam rack, single-layer aisle storage and double-layer aisle storage.
Project Highlights
- Cooperation between FMR & LMR
Under the same robot control system, the latent mobile robots seamlessly docked with the forklift mobile robots to realize efficient material handling and improve warehouse density.
- Distribution across Floors
The cooperation between the latent mobile robot and the double lift platform achieved the packaging material inbound delivery and empty pallet outbound delivery between the 1st and 2nd floor, as well as the packaging material outbound delivery and returned packaging material inbound delivery.
- Integration with Automation Equipment
Our mobile robots were docked with various automation equipment like mechanic arms, lift platforms, automatic doors, gratings, conveyor lines and wrapping machines to upgrade production automation.
- Barcode Reading & Pallet Color Recognition
The solution also adopted ID5000 series smart code readers to gather the information of inbound material via docking with WMS, allowing the traceability of every bottle of beer during its lifecycle. Pallets with different colors belong to different suppliers. With Hikrobot industrial cameras and VM algorithm platform, the color of the pallet was recognized to ease the empty pallet recycling.
Customer Benefits
– 30% increased production efficiency and 20% reduced labor costs
– Goods-to-Person solution lowers the labor intensity and improves the picking accuracy
– The cooperation between RCS, iWMS and customer upper layers allows paperless production
– Digitalize the inventory information and trace the whole process of packaging materials, enhancing the inventory accuracy
