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Warehouse logistics firmly under control with viad@t

27.08.2012

viastore builds AS/RS for pharmaceutical company Medice

The pharmaceutical industry places especially high demands on intralogistics. All products and processes must be documented, 100 percent availability is expected for the goods. Therefore suppliers must have themselves audited. Moreover the WMS must be validated using a complex procedure. This also applied to viastore when it built a fully automated storage/retrieval system including the WMS standard solution viad@t for Medice. Now the established manufacturer of well-known, high quality medicinal products such as Meditonsin® and Medikinet® is able to implement its international growth strategy in an economically efficient and ecologically sustainable manner.

Medice has more than doubled its sales within only five years. The pharmaceutical company based in Iserlohn, Germany generates an annual turnover of about € 150 million. “We have slightly trimmed our product range compared to a couple of years ago,” Dr. med. Sigurd Pütter, Managing Partner of the medium-sized family enterprise, explains his recipe for success. “Instead we have been focusing on niche segments where we are among the market leaders.” This includes the renal care & anemia management area of competence, where Medice offers a broad portfolio of products for dialysis patients in addition to epoetin and iron preparations.

Furthermore, Medice is the leading supplier of medications for treating ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), which is the most frequently encountered psychiatric disorder in children and adolescents. Two substances with different dose levels as well as a comprehensive range of services help specialists to implement multi-modal treatment approaches. Self medication is another of Medice’s areas of competence. Here too the company has been able to significantly improve its market position. With well-known brands such as the cold remedy Meditonsin, skin preparation Soventol® and revitalizer Medivitan®, it is among the top-level suppliers in each respect ive category. Since 2008, Meinl has increasingly been implementing structures to enable the international distribution of its products. And these efforts have already started to bear fruit: “Sales outside of Germany now account for about 20 percent of our turnover, and the tendency is rising,” says Dr. med. Dr. oec. Richard Ammer, Managing Director at Medice since 2003.

Warehouse approaching capacity

Today Medice’s range of products includes 350 items for the national and international markets. All of these must reach the customers reliably, quickly and on time. “In the pharmaceutical industry it is customary to have discount agreements with the health insurers,” says Reiner Busch, Logistics Manager at Medice, explaining the special challenges. “One requirement in these contracts is that there must not be any supply bottlenecks. Otherwise the insurers will take recourse against the manufacturer.” So the raw material inventories and finished products stocks must be correspondingly large. Medice’s own goal of shipping all products ordered by 12am on the same day places additional demands on in-house logistics. Due to rapid growth, however, this was getting harder and harder for the company to achieve. “There were quite a few rough spots wherever you looked,” Reiner Busch recalls. “Warehouse capacities were no longer sufficient and the storage and retrieval processes were far too slow.” Often the production had to wait for several hours for raw material supplies from the warehouse. “This resulted in the staff creating buffers and storing materials in production or in the shipping zone,” says Reiner Busch. This was not only inefficient, but also used up a lot of space. “And space is very expensive in pharmaceutical production,” he points out.

Speed and process security in focus

Medice therefore worked out a master plan for advancing the plant. This defined how the company should develop over the next few years and what structures would be appropriate to lay the necessary foundations. One important decision was to eliminate the bottleneck in the warehouse. A second, new warehouse was to be built to double the existing warehouse capacity. An internal project team planned a three-aisle, double deep and fully automated unit load storage/retrieval system (AS/RS) with 4,772 storage locations. “High flexibility, speed and process security in particular were all aspects in favor of a fully automated system,” says Reiner Busch. The new warehouse was to offer sufficient space for all finished products. Moreover a row of racks was to be reserved for storing raw materials and primary packaging ma terials on aluminum pallets complying with the most stringent demands for hygiene in the pharmaceutical industry.

The new system directly adjoins the existing AS/RS, which means it had to be integrated into the existing plant structure. Therefore the connection of the new automated warehouse to the old AS/RS as well as to the production and the newly built shipping center was planned at various levels. A lateral shuttle car on the upper floor serves as the central element connecting goods receipt, stor age and production. Connection to the shipping center is via a 120-meter (131 yd) subterranean tunnel, also using a lateral shuttle car.

System supplier wanted

The Medice managers set off with the finished plans in search of a company that would be up to implementing the warehouse. “For us it was important to find a system supplier that would deliver all the required components and software from a single source,” emphasizes Wolfgang Wiedemann, Chief Technology Officer at Medice. Following the careful examination of various companies, Medice selected viastore, a leading international supplier of turn- key intralogistics systems. As a general contractor, viastore supplied and installed the entire warehouse and conveyor system equipment. This included the rack system, three viapal storage/ retrieval machines with telescopic shuttle forks for double deep storage, the lateral shuttle cars and four vertical conveyors that transport the pallets to the respective conveyor system level. Twelve fast roll-up doors and three fire protection doors also formed part of the order scope. The required control levels (SPS, material flow system, system visualizationviad@tVISU and warehouse management system) were implemented using the integrated system solution viad@t from viastore.

Energy efficiency in the warehouse

Wolfgang Wiedemann also attaches great importance to energyefficient intralogistics: “The warehouse has been consistently tuned for low energy consumption.” For example, the climate required for storing pharmaceuticals is achieved through floor heating and natural ventilation, rather than through an energyintensive air-conditioning system. Consequently, the logistics experts from Stuttgart implemented their “viastore blue” energy concept at Medice: “It measures not only individual consumers, but evaluates the entire system,” explains Knut Schröder, Head of viastore systems’ branch office in Northern Germany. “Various measures such as energy recovery, optimized travel routes of stor age/retrieval machines and energy-efficient drives can bring about energy savings of 30 percent or more.”

Software competence was convincing

viastore’s hardware competence was important for the Medice decision makers. But it was the company’s software competence that ultimately decided the matter: “viastore can map the process logic required for our warehouse in its standard WMS viad@t. We had confidence in this right from the beginning and this has proved to be justified,” says Reiner Busch. “These days it is not only hardware that counts, but rather how the components are brought together, the interfaces laid out and the processes managed. viastore was better at this than the other bidders.”

The original plan was to implement only the storage location management using the viastore software viad@t. All the other warehouse management functions were to be performed via Medice’s ERP system “Blending”. “However, this idea was significantly optimized with the help of viastore,” says Busch, smiling. “It didn’t take long before we decided to perform the entire warehouse management using viad@t because this WMS offers many more functions than any ERP system,” he explains and continues with an example: “The new conveyor system is very fast. But if the response times in warehouse management were to take several seconds, then the planned throughput still wouldn’t be feasible.” Wolfgang Wiedemann adds another aspect: “Should we convert to another ERP system some time in the future, then this will not affect our warehouse management.”

Software validation according to GAMP 5

However, prior to being able to implement viad@t at Medice, viastore had to have itself audited: “We are a pharmaceutical company. This means that all our suppliers must undergo a qualification and approval process,” emphasizes Reiner Busch. In addition to effective services, it is mainly the software that is in focus during this process. In a complex procedure, this was validated in accordance with GAMP 5, a recognized standard for software validation in the pharmaceutical industry. “The auditors exam ine whether the software does what it is expected to do and how reliable it is,” Reiner Busch sums up. For example, is singlelot picking applied during material storage and retrieval and does the status management comply with this? Are inbound orders and transactions managed properly? Is it possible to issue access authorizations? In addition, every modification to a function must be documented down to the smallest detail. “Integrated documen tation is a standard function in viad@t,” says Stephan Bruns from viastore, who took care of the project at the sales level. “With our software we are excellently prepared for validation.”

Minutes instead of hours

When the constructional requirements for the new system had been created, viastore implemented the entire warehouse and conveyor system within about three months. Recently the complete system went live. “Right from the first week it has been operating perfectly,” Wolfgang Wiedemann points out. The new logistics system can handle up to 1,200 shipments daily even in one-shift operation. “We were able to significantly reduce the inventory in the individual areas,” Reiner Busch describes the new performance capability of Medice logistics. “The free areas can now once again be used for production purposes and in-house material orders are delivered within just five minutes instead of five hours.”



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