Luik Natie: monitoring logistic flow in cold store

The customer

Luik Natie is a logistics service provider specialising in temperature-controlled warehousing of products like frozen vegetables, potato products, meat and fish. The favourable location in the port of Antwerp allows Luik Natie to store pallets with products being supplied from all over the world in its cold stores. Per shift an average of 2.640 pallets is loaded and/or unloaded.

The challenge

As a result of their continuous growth, Luik Natie decided to build an ultramodern cold store suitable for the storage of 22.000 euro-pallets. In order to make optimum use of the space available, they decided to automate the warehouse with 16 m high racks.

Luik Natie wants to know at all times the exact location of all products of all customers and was therefore looking for an automatic solution for the identification and localisation of pallets in the frozen storage, which is – due to the high racks – also suitable for height measurements.

The solution

During a prior Proof of Concept, we demonstrated that our RFID Item Identification & Tracking solution offers an accurate and up-to-date overview of the internal logistic movements. Thanks to the automatic location and load control, every step of every pallet is monitored throughout the logistic flow in the cold store. 

Logistic flow

The forklifts collect the loads at one of the 12 loading and unloading docks of the new cold store and they unload them in the zone provided. In this unloading zone, the RFID labels are printed and applied to the pallets, after which they are wrapped and weighed on the conveyor belt. Fixed RFID detection points are provided at these conveyor belts in order to detect the passing RFID labels. The data read is linked to a server on which the middleware is running, which ensures the further processing.

The reach trucks collect the pallets from the conveyor belt and drive them to the cold stores. Thanks to the communication with the WMS controlling the racks, the reach truck drives to the location desired – where the racks are already open thanks to the RFID scan – reaches the desired height, drives into the rack and reads the location when it lowers the pallet in the racks. The driver receives a confirmation from the WMS on his panel PC. At the moment that the location, position and height match, the pallet is positioned and the reach truck moves down. A message is sent to the WMS and the driver also receives a message on his screen.