Growing manufacturing levels turns Beef Products Inc. to automation
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Westfalia AS/RS
- Westfalia WMS
- Westfalia Satellite® rack entry vehicle
Tech Stack
- Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS)
- Warehouse Management System (WMS)
- Barcode Scanning
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Automation & Control - Automation & Process Control Systems
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
- Functional Applications - Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Quality Assurance
- Warehouse & Inventory Management
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
- Warehouse Automation
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) is the world’s leading manufacturer of boneless lean beef, headquartered in Dakota Dunes, South Dakota. BPI is renowned for its high standards in food safety and quality, producing nearly 1,000,000 lbs of beef per day. The company operates a continuous manufacturing process that requires stringent quality control measures to ensure the safety and quality of its products. BPI's operations are extensive, necessitating advanced storage and logistics solutions to manage the large volumes of beef produced daily. The company sought to enhance its material handling and inventory control processes through automation to maintain its high standards and improve operational efficiency.
The Challenge
Food safety is a critical priority at Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) and with manufacturing approaching 1,000,000 lbs per day, it was essential for BPI to automate the material handling and inventory control process. Through automation BPI would achieve maximum storage and optimize their warehouse logistics. BPI required the use of an area adjacent to the meat processing plant to store products and process orders. BPI needed storage capacity in excess of 20 million lbs of beef. In addition, the available land for the freezer was 400’ away from manufacturing with a railroad truck separating the building lots. BPI’s continuous manufacturing operation produces boxed beef, and while the product type is identified by a bar code label on each individual case, the product grade is not determined until the results of quality control testing are known. As a result, BPI needed a way to apply readable bar codes after production, on finished-palletized loads to allow scanning and identification within the new automated warehouse and at their customer’s dock. In addition, their food safety program prohibits shipment of all products until quality assurance testing results are proven. BPI needed the ability to quarantine all products and then to provide automatic release of palletized products as ready-to-ship inventory.
The Solution
To garner the greatest amount of storage, run the most efficient logistics system, and provide cost savings, a high-density AS/RS was developed. Westfalia designed the conveying system to include approximately 18 pallets of accumulation between the palletizer and the print-and-apply station in order to allow enough time to gather additional information regarding product grade prior to the labeling system. The pallet loads are then automatically conveyed into the freezer, where they arrive at a turntable and are directed to one of two Storage Retrieval Machines (SRMs) for storage. The AS/RS is designed with two SRMs in one aisle, thereby providing redundancy - should one SRM require maintenance, the other can still service the aisle. The 15-level high freezer storage system has 10-deep storage lanes on both sides of the aisle. Westfalia’s patented Satellite® rack entry vehicle and triple pallet support rack system provide fast 110 pallets/hour throughput rates with safer pallet handling. The innovative high-density storage design furnishes 11,886 pallet positions in a 20,235 square foot freezer.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
.png)
Case Study
Improving Vending Machine Profitability with the Internet of Things (IoT)
The vending industry is undergoing a sea change, taking advantage of new technologies to go beyond just delivering snacks to creating a new retail location. Intelligent vending machines can be found in many public locations as well as company facilities, selling different types of goods and services, including even computer accessories, gold bars, tickets, and office supplies. With increasing sophistication, they may also provide time- and location-based data pertaining to sales, inventory, and customer preferences. But at the end of the day, vending machine operators know greater profitability is driven by higher sales and lower operating costs.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
Energy Management System at Sugar Industry
The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.
Case Study
Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study
Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.
