Danish Crown

If the automated warehouse in the new Danish slaughter house, situated near Horsens, were to collapse, the consequences would be incalculable. Danish Crown’s newly built slaughter house is mainly based on fully automatic flow, where the sliced meat is constantly packed, weighed, labelled, sorted, palletised and called for. If the IT-controlled process in the packing and palletisation area should brake down (partly or totally), it would have tremendous consequences that would prevent the pigs from being properly received, slaughtered and processed. In extreme cases, the transports would have to be diverted to other slaughter houses to ensure that the farmers would be able to deliver their pigs.

Logimatic’s president Karsten Bangshaab is quite aware of the heavy responsibility that accompanies Logimatic as the supplier of the warehouse management system to the largest slaughter house in Europe. As soon as the new slaughter house (worth app. 2 billion DKK) is fully operational, its staff will slaughter 77,000 pigs per week. As a result, Logimatic’s Warehouse Control System, LOGIA, has to ensure that the enormous quantities of meat must be sorted, packed, palletised and called for in the correct order and thus be consistent with the submitted sales orders.

“Despite the fact that it is an enormous and rather complicated assignment, we are proud to have been given the opportunity to resolve it. We have to go at least 20 years back in time to come across a warehouse and factory project of equal size in Denmark. Furthermore, since Danish Crown has chosen to utilise the most advanced technology in every aspect of the factory, it is safe to state that we are dealing with the world’s most modern slaughter house”, says Karsten Bangshaab.

3,000 boxes per hour
The unique system offered by Univeyor and Logimatic covers the entire flow in the warehouse – from automatic registration of meat boxes that arrive on assembly lines from production to sorting, palletising, packing, storing, and selecting for shipment. The enormous amount of slaughtering challenges the system to be able to handle 3,000 boxes per hour, which corresponds to 110 pallets. The great challenge for Logimatic is the many cut surfaces. LOGIA has to communicate with both sales order and warehouse modules in SAP R/3, which are delivered by the internal IT-department of Danish Crown and with the superior ABB factory database, which controls the entire slaughter house. Additionally, LOGIA ensures a correct course of the internal communication with tracking, bar code scanners, automatic palletisation stations and other PLC-management.

When the sales department has registered a sales order in SAP R/3, the order is sent to the data base of the factory, which generates a production order and matching bar codes where al relevant information about the slaughtering process and own-check is collected. When the boxes arrive randomly from the packing department, LOGIA matches the account number with the controlling bar code on the boxes on-line. The bar code of the boxes is then scanned, thereby sorting the boxes item by item in the box passages. Once a ‘train’ of boxes is ready to be placed on a pallet, it is automatically sent to the robot-controlled plant (according to the first come, first served principle), where the boxes are automatically packed and palletised according to the pallet pattern that LOGIA sends with the ‘train’.

All the completed pallets are automatically collected by a transporter that arranges their further transport. When it is time to remove the pallets from the conveyer belt, LOGIA ensures that the truck driver is notified through the truck terminal. The whole ride comes to an end by the platform where the trucks collect pallets in a pre-determined order to be delivered according to the sales order. Subsequently, LOGIA sends a message to SAP R/3 which handles invoices and the like.

“Automation of the palletisation and shipment area has made the working processes much more efficient, thereby reducing unit costs. With automation we have especially eliminated aspects such as heavy lifting and monotonous labour. Seeing as Danish Crown wishes to be the leading slaughter house as regards efficiency and ergonomics, therefore the employed technology and IT-management will constitute future upgrading of our slaughter houses at home and abroad”, says Søren F. Eriksen, project manager of Danish Crown.

Maximum operating efficiency
From the beginning, Danish Crown has decided that the administrative system and the factory system should work independently, in that way it would still be possible to slaughter even though the communication between the systems or SAP R/3 is partly or completely out of order. Such an arrangement is only possible due to LOGIA’s ‘bank’ of sales orders – until the error is eliminated, the staff complies with the ‘bank’ of sales orders. The data between the systems is then automatically updated, thereby creating identical information in all systems.

"There are numerous possible errors that need consideration. If a bar code is illegible, it is then impossible to sort the boxes and proceed. If the equipment fails, a pile of boxes and pallets emerges on the conveyer belts, again preventing the process from continuing. However, all possible errors have indeed been carefully considered. Among others, in several different areas we have established an error/reject lane for useless boxes just as we have maximised the focus on operating efficiency, especially in the ORACLE database server which constitutes the heart of the system. The demands required of Danish Crown are tremendous and this is why the server is equipped with Hot Swap discs in a configuration, thereby ensuring that the system is able to run despite a possible disc crash. Additionally, it is also possible to insert a new disc without shutting down the machine. Not only is the server provided with a double power supply, it is also protected against data failure in case of a power failure. Needless to say, we have made a serious attempt to include all the factors”, says Ole Tougaard, the technical director, who is responsible for the practical implementation of the project.

Other new and large orders
Since Logimatic has received the order in autumn 2002, four-five employees have constantly been occupied with the project. Tests have been made over a longer period of time, and as a result, in recent months, Danish Crown has gradually received more pigs. Once the slaughter house has put three shift teams into practice, all customer service activities will continuously be operated from Logimatic’s offices – in that way it will be possible to eliminate all errors as soon as possible.