On Today's Menu: Orderpickers

Imagine going to your favorite restaurant for dinner only to find that they're out of napkins, or attending a major sporting event and being told that the venue is out of plastic cups.

It takes a lot of supplies to run a hotel, restaurant, sports facility, university or retail store. These businesses require everything from convection ovens to pot holders, soap dispensers and mops.

Boelter Supply, based in Glendale, Wis., offers almost everything foodservice and hospitality businesses need to stay up and running.

Boelter stocks and distributes thousands of supplies, including kitchenware, appliances, table settings, janitorial supplies and furniture and even provides computer-aided design professionals to help design a facility. To store its vast offering of supplies, Boelter needs a large warehouse with enough rack space for storage. In October 2007, Boelter moved into a 100,000-square-foot building and installed 26 rows of 264-foot racking. All this space allows Boelter to store everything, including an entire aisle of cleaning products and another aisle full of trash-can liners.

The ceiling in the new warehouse is 30 feet high — 7 feet higher than Boelter's previous location — which enabled the company to install 25-foot-tall racks. With long aisles and tall racking, Boelter needed a new fleet of lift trucks that would reach the top of the racks and navigate the narrow aisles, which led them to purchase seven orderpickers and rent an additional one.

Because the new warehouse has narrow aisles, Boelter decided to install a digital wire guidance system to complement the orderpickers. In its previous building, Boelter used a rail-guided system to help operators keep orderpickers on a straight path within the aisles. The system offers lift truck tracking and stability without the need for adjustment by electronically engaging a guide wire on the warehouse floor to ensure that lift trucks always are traveling down the center of the aisle. This eliminates steel rails on floors and aisle-entry devices that reduce storage space on the ground levels of racking systems.

With a wire guidance system, operators can travel at higher speeds in the aisles and focus on handling the load and picking orders instead of steering in the aisle. The lift truck automatically slows as the operator reaches higher heights to give operators greater control as they pick products from high racks. The aisles in Boelter's facility also are equipped with end-of-aisle slowdown, which slows the lift trucks to 3 miles per hour at the beginning and end of the aisles.

“The system automatically slows you down so you don't leave an aisle at full speed,” says Steve Burbank, warehouse manager for Boelter. “The end-of-aisle slowdown helps operators keep control of the orderpickers as they are leaving the aisles while still allowing higher speeds within the aisle.”

Operator Interaction

Boelter's regional distribution center requires three shifts of employees working five days per week to stock products and pick orders for delivery. Roughly 25 employees are certified lift truck operators who interact with the lift trucks and wire guidance system daily. Michael Quesnell, distribution manager for Boelter, says the staff finds the wire guidance system easy to use.

“Order picking is most heavy during the evening shift,” Quesnell says. “Second shift pulls things out piecemeal, and first shift puts away pallets of products. This means our people are going in and out of aisles multiple times on a shift, and we can have all eight of our orderpickers running at once.”