ADVERTORIAL

In January of this year , Swisslog was proud to participate in the commissioning of the 20 th AutoStore system installed in a Medline distribution center .

If you haven ’ t been following the evolution of warehouse technology for the last ten years , you may not fully appreciate the significance of this event .

Pioneering Warehouse Innovation

Medline ’ s history with Swisslog and AutoStore dates back to 2012 , when consistent growth and changing order profiles caused Medline to evaluate “ goods-to-person ” automation technologies .

Goods-to-person technologies change how customer orders are fulfilled in the distribution center . Instead of having personnel walk the floor to find and retrieve the products required for customer orders , goods-to-person automation brings the products to the pickers at specially designed workstations . The result is faster , more accurate order fulfillment .

A team led by Daniel Schwartz , vice president of engineering at Medline , was particularly intrigued by AutoStore , an innovative robotic system that offered fewer single points of failure than any of the other technologies they evaluated .

But only a few AutoStore systems were in operation at the time , and they were in Europe . So , the question the team faced was , how can we leverage the benefits of this innovative system without incurring too much risk ?

The answer led to the beginning of a more than ten-year relationship with Swisslog .

The Value of Experience

As a leader in warehouse automation , Swisslog was the first integration partner selected by AutoStore . Swisslog ’ s role as an AutoStore integrator includes configuring the system and designing workstations to the customer ’ s business and

18 SUPPLY CHAIN OPTIMIZATION Issue 8 / 2024