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Interactively and optimally customized intralogistics

03.08.2017

SSI Schaefer is making advising on, planning, and implementing logistics systems even more efficient with an innovative software platform.

»LogiVision«, the interactive framework, offers numerous tools for taking a holistic view of a project with reliable analysis data and a thoroughly interconnected project flow. LogiVision is designed as a platform that, on the one hand, integrates data from various sources and combines them into one overall picture. On the other hand, its client server architecture allows all those involved in the project to access the relevant planning data from anywhere in the world via laptop, smartphone, or tablet, in order to modify this data to create the optimal solution based on key figures. Using analysis and simulation algorithms, projections of future developments can also be integrated into project planning.

The intralogistics department is being equipped with a new warehouse. The project teams have been assembled for a short while. A projector displays the overall layout of the current material flows on a screen. The planners at SSI Schaefer have been preparing the customer data for a few days, based on which they have created an interactive key figure and material flow model, which they have saved on the LogiVision presentation platform. This is now available to the teams. The latest figures have been produced. Do they have an effect on the planned processes? »We considered replacing the conveying section with automated guided vehicles and so integrated them into the material flow layout,« explains a member of the customer’s team, and with just a few clicks, the image on the screen changes. »This would mean increasing the number of vehicles,« says the project manager from SSI Schaefer, and displays this on the layout. »You can see this here – otherwise the material flow would back up at the transfer locations.« A few more clicks, different basic figures for picks, order lines, shift models or throughput, and soon alternatives are being tested »live« in the model.

This is more or less how designing a system with the new LogiVision platform from SSI Schaefer will work. »For intralogistics projects, whether it’s designing a fully automated warehouse or restructuring and modernizing an existing facility, our consultancy services play a pivotal role,« says Lars-Boris Böttcher, Head of Data Analysis and Simulation, Business Development at SSI Schaefer, illustrating the advantages of the system. »Alongside specialist expertise and references, the possibility of introducing modern information and communication technologies is also important. With LogiVision, we put this into action and bring dull project data and its interplay alive.«

The LogiVision framework is an innovative instrument that makes SSI Schaefer’s consultancy and planning projects even more efficient. With LogiVision, SSI Schaefer guides and supports the user throughout the whole project – starting with concept evaluation and workshops before the project even begins, through in-depth advice during the implementation phase right up to start-up. Even potential future enhancements can be checked and planned using LogiVision. The platform can incorporate, prepare, analyze, and display the results of simulations. »LogiVision supports SSI Schaefer’s claim of being able to advise the customer from the initial concept through the planning, realization and operation of a system, and right up to providing solutions for future demands, as a competent and reliable partner,« explains Böttcher.

The analysis and simulation platform LogiVision, a tool that uses the latest technology now aids intralogistics consultants. The IT program offers the advisors, project engineers, sales team, and the customer’s specialist departments direct access to the current plans via a web browser. The basis for this is a Business Discovery Platform, where the data is stored and visualized. Using dashboards, the relevant framework data and key figures can be interactively edited with different tools and their results can be analyzed – even by the customer. »A highly modern consultancy and planning tool for thoroughly interconnected, dynamic project development with a holistic view of the processes,« says the expert from SSI Schaefer. »In this age of mobile communication, users are used to having immediate access to information. With LogiVision, we are taking logistics planning in this direction.«

LogiVision does not only allow processes and components to be designed to precisely meet current needs based on actual data. The platform also allows both the system provider and the system operator to analyze and optimize the system layout at every planning phase using real-time data, and enables forecast data, changed order volumes and new business processes to be taken into account when designing the system. LogiVision also combines data from a variety of sources – such as historical, planning and simulation data – which provides a comprehensive and holistic overview of the project, its key figures, and the relevant framework conditions. In doing so, the tool highlights the security of investment and implementation of a long-term, future-proof intralogistics system that already takes future needs and/or convenient expansion options into account. »Our goal is to plan systems that cater to the customer’s future requirements as well as possible,« elaborates Böttcher. »With LogiVision, the customer’s current movement data can also be analyzed, evaluated and displayed in the form of a visualization on the presentation platform.«

And there’s more: based on the customer’s growth projections, key-figure-based projections and simulations can also be integrated into the virtual model. The analyses are prepared by the analysts at SSI Schaefer and are available to everyone involved in the project. Once set up, all contributors can access the project data filed on the platform, to edit it and implement the subsequent planning steps based on concrete and reliable key figures. Any authorized project participant can connect to the platform from any corner of the planet via a secure connection. The LogiVision server generates interactive dashboards for the browser on demand, which allow the user to view their virtual system model live in the project database, to filter data and to create their own representations of the system. Representations and data can be accessed without the need for installing additional programs and are easy to use. »This facilitates an interactive, holistic view of the project and a thoroughly interconnected planning and project flow,« summarizes Böttcher. »LogiVision prepares the individual key figures and brings them alive for our customers.«

Alongside this, the planners and consultants at SSI Schaefer can access the latest data model, integrate the customer’s suggestions directly into this model and display the effects. »With LogiVision, we can combine the relevant data from a variety of sources and develop and test out different scenarios using this data,« says Böttcher. Which product groups or order types will be assigned to which areas and processes? Which processes are ideal for order completion? How does changing factors affect the design as a whole? These are questions that the consultants and planners at SSI Schaefer can answer promptly with LogiVision. »By editing the working-time models and movement, master, incoming or outgoing goods data, we ultimately convert the data into an optimal system- and material-flow design,« says Böttcher.

Essential to success is the early involvement of SSI Schaefer’s logistics planning analysts. »The use of the framework with planning software in the initial consultancy and planning meetings helps create an objective, future-proof design and avoids delays to the project,« summarizes Böttcher. »An efficient logistics system is designed from the inside out by analyzing, planning and simulating. The end result is the ideal system. In addition to a streamlined project flow, LogiVision offers a sound basis for decisions when designing the optimally tailored system, which is already based on future requirements.«



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