Implementation of platbricks

Background Situation

One of the largest car manufacturers globally, officially opened a new plant in Ladson, South Carolina, in 2018. Right from the start, the manufacturer was commissioned with a major project requiring to improve logistics processes; Amazon ordered 20,000 cars for its delivery service. 

Initially, the assembly line workers were using paper picking sheets for commissioning on the assembly line. As the manual process is very time consuming and error-prone, the company was looking for an intelligent solution to enable paperless picking.  Therefore, the goal was to improve performance, reduce potential errors, and ensure high profitability. Arvato Systems was selected to enable the picking process on the assembly line in Ladson using portable devices.

Vision

The goal was to reduce manual and paper-heavy processes by increasing efficiency through hands-free mobility and paperless picking. The solution was expected to optimize internal IT processes, improve picking performance, ensure profitability, and enable warehouse visibility through data. 

Solution

In this project, we provided the Arvato Smart Logistics Platform as a middleware to connect the wearable devices with the Manufacturing Execution System (MES). The assembly line workers were equipped with smart handheld devices, the wearable devices of the customer’s choice. The integration of those devices with the MES allowed for a faster and more accurate workflow compared to conventional paper picking sheets. Simultaneously, introducing barcode scanning helped reducing error rates. With the new integrated ASLP solution, the supervisors can now see the status of every order at any time, on various devices such as their smartphones. Not only status tracking is featured in the solution, but insightful reports are generated, allowing the supervisor to make predictions, intervene in events, and keep track of operations.