The HARTMANN GROUP is a leading European supplier of system solutions for medicine and care. Medical professionals and patients rely on HARTMANN’s product brands in the incontinence management, wound care and infection management segments every day. The HARTMANN GROUP’s transport logistics are strongly influenced by the product range, which is characterized by high volumes at low value. This requires optimal warehouse utilization and efficient truck planning.
The aim of the collaboration between HARTMANN and AIM was to transform the processes for order picking and bottleneck management from manual planning to AI-supported control. Always keeping an eye on deadlines.
Even during the system changeover, the picking processes had to be guaranteed to run smoothly at all times.
The optimization should also have an impact on subsequent warehouse processes: At the right time, in the right place. In concrete terms, this means that picking activities should be distributed evenly throughout the day to avoid overloads or idle times in the warehouse or at goods issue.
Transition to AI-supported control
AIM has introduced its AI-supported AIM.schedule solution for the HARTMANN GROUP, which assists planners in making better decisions at the following points during the daily operations of picking:
- Reducing the workload of the planning team
- Better utilization of resources
- Optimized processes for greater efficiency in the warehouse and compliance with delivery agreements
- More precise planning & clear process visualization
The use of artificial intelligence has become a real game changer in order picking. Why? Picking parcels involves a large number of small-scale processes that are coordinated to ensure an optimum workflow.
Industrial AI can perfectly relieve the planning team at HARTMANN, as complex data can be processed in the shortest possible time and all parameters that are important for the process can also be taken into account. The manual planning effort has been drastically reduced and now leads to faster planning results in day-to-day business. This gives the team more time to manually adjust special cases, such as express deliveries.
Overview
Customer
HARTMANN GROUP, leading European supplier of system solutions for medicine and care
Requirements
Optimization of order picking, transition from manual to AI-supported control of picking waves, switch to truck-based planning
Solution
AIM.schedule from the Smart Warehouse Suite: for optimizing truck utilization and picking times, with a focus on flexibility in planning
Results
- Reduction of the planning effort, e.g. through truck-based planning
- Even distribution of the workload by distributing picking evenly throughout the day (according to truck departure times)
- Reduction in the waiting time of goods at the goods-out area, consequently requiring less buffer space.
- Compliance with the delivery agreement despite rescheduling at short notice
Text taken over from the original and translated – AIM
