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Transparency for millions of documents

17.12.2012

viastore is building an automatic file warehouse with 2.3 million carton storage locations for Russia's biggest bank

The new central automatic archive center of Russia's OAO Sberbank, taking up a surface area of 15,000 square meters, is located in the Tomilino logistics park south-east of Moscow. The bank intends to store here all the documents of its customers from the central federal district of the Russian Federation. For some of these documents, which in some cases go as far back as the 1920s, there is no limitation period. This enormous volume of paper is kept in a 16-aisle automatic tray warehouse, which viastore systems supplied and installed in turn-key state. The viad@tWMS software ensures smooth warehouse administration.

"90 years in two million cartons", notes German Gref, board chairman of Sberbank, with a wink, as he surveys the scene during the inauguration ceremony inside the huge new archive logistics center. "If we were to line up all the cartons one behind the other, they would cover nearly 780 kilometers – that's a bit more than the distance from Moscow to St. Petersburg." As he says this, an articulated-arm robot takes a carton off a metal tray that was automatically conveyed from the shelving system seconds before by a viaspeed XL storage/retrieval machine.

The Russian bank headquartered in Moscow is the biggest bank in eastern Europe and has around 250 million private customers and 1.3 million business clients. The OAO Sberbank of Russia was founded in 1841 as an association of savings banks. It has about 18,800 branches and offices, 241,000 employees and is the leading bank in Russia for both private and business customers.
"In Russia, the banks have to keep their documents for up to 90 years, depending on their importance", remarks Gref. These documents are needed for credit extensions, financing, internal auditing or tax audits. Sberbank was the only bank in Russia to collate all the transactions of its population during the time that the Soviet Union existed. "Handling this enormous amount of data wouldn't really be a problem if Russian law recognized electronic data", says Gref, "but in our case only paper is counted as a document."

At Sberbank a gigantic volume of paper has thus built up which until now was spread around several branches in more or less sorted form. But every day the Sberbank branches request 2,000 to 3,000 documents from the archives. Until now the employees had to search the entire network of the bank manually for documents before they could be sent to a certain branch. That costs a lot of time and hence money, and also there was no consistent data transparency. That made it clear: all this paper needs to be stored centrally. To do so, the bank needed a new archive and logistics center ensuring rapid and dependable access to all documents.

Optimally located from the logistic viewpoint

Very close to Moscow, south-east of the city center, six kilometers from the highway ring, and between the Rjazan and Novorjazan highways, is the Tomilino Business Park, of 210 hectares. This is where Sberbank has secured 15,000 square meters of building space for its archive logistics center in its own building, K-8, with a total surface area of 53,000 square meters. The design concept, the integration of the technology and the linking of the system to the archiving and recording system of Sberbank was handled by viastore systems together with its Russian partners. "From development of the concept to implementation took just one and a half years", says Gref, delighted about the rapid completion of the project.

Fully automatic out of the shelf

The entire system is 97 meters long, 134 meters wide and 12.4 meters high. The warehouse has 16 aisles. "That gives us a total of 79,296 storage locations for trays", says Harald Fink, project leader of viastore systems. They are automatically supplied by the viaspeed XL SRU. Other solutions were also discussed. "But in comparison with container or carton warehouses, we achieve here the highest storage density and also the highest throughput", explains Volker Wissinger from viastore, who looked after the project during its planning and sales phase. "The processes are now very transparent", continues Fink. The employees at the bank's branches assign file numbers to the document folders containing the files. With this number, the appropriate document can be identified at any time using the archive management software. Then the employees put the document folders into cartons. "We have two document groups", says the project leader. "Some of them have to be frequently accessed, others more rarely." For that reason the documents are filed in two different carton types. Cartons with files needed frequently are larger. They weight about 19 kilograms, the others seven. "Of the more than two million boxes in the warehouse, we access about 240,000 frequently", explains Fink.

In the new archive logistics center, the incoming materials employees give each carton a barcode. This clearly indicates which document folders with which files are inside which carton. The viad@t software is linked to both archive management systems in use at Sberbank, allowing the cartons to be clearly identified later on. "This means that even expired documents can be easily identified and automatically – and hence quickly and reliably – destroyed", says Fink. The conveying equipment, which can handle about 1,400 cartons an hour, then passes the cartons to a weight/contour checking point and after that to the advance zone of the shelving system. Eight six-axis articulated-arm robots are located here, and have a combined clamping/suction gripper. These robots pick up the cartons and place them onto the 2238 x 880 millimeter trays, which are equipped with special dividers. "Depending on carton type, we can place twelve to 30 cartons into the container", says Fink. "The dividers above all assist precise and automatic positioning of the cartons", he explains. "By using robots, we avoid both the errors to which the people doing storage and retrieval work are inevitably prone when doing such a monotonous and physically demanding job", he adds. Each robot can achieve up to 420 accesses per hour. "To permit efficient processing, the SRU picks up a tray simultaneously with the retrieval. That cuts down travel", he explains. About 80 storage and retrieval operations are possible per aisle every hour.

If an employee at a branch of the bank needs a certain file, he requests it using the archive management system. The system transmits the number of the document folder to viad@t in the central automatic archiving center, which there manages the cartons in the warehouse. viad@t initiates retrieval of the tray, which is passed by the conveyor to a robot. The latter grips the required carton and places it onto the conveyor which takes it to an employee. The employee takes out the required document folder, notes its removal in the system, sends the folder or a copy of the documents by courier to the branch – and returns the carton to the warehouse. "The required file can in this way get to one of the branches as a scan or by courier within a few hours", explains Wissinger.

ABC classification arranged by frequency of accesses

The viad@t software classifies the cartons on the basis of the information in the barcode to the categories A, B or C – and in this way they are also distributed inside the shelving system. "The shelf rows 1 to 18 contain the Category A cartons, to which access is very frequent", says Wissinger. The shelf rows 19 to 88 contain cartons of Categories B and C. The warehouse management software also ensures that the warehouse is evenly filled. The shelving system, which like the trays was supplied by Bito, can be subjected to a load of 1850 kilograms per square meter. "This is six times as much as in comparable systems", Wissinger stresses.

"Paper, particularly old paper, burns very quickly", says project leader Fink, touching on a subject that naturally preoccupies many archives and pointing out a carton with files dated 1938. "If there were ever a fire, it would be catastrophic for the bank." This is why particular attention was devoted to fire safety.

"We have sealed the warehouse interior using fast roll-up doors and air locks, and reduced the oxygen content to 13 to maximum 15 percent", he says.
"You couldn't get a flame from a match or a cigarette lighter in here." This inerting feature has another benefit besides: there is a consistently low humidity that considerably slows the ageing process of the paper. "Optimum climatic conditions for the paper prevail here", Wissinger stresses. Fire protection doors provide additional safety. It's another reason why robots are used: people could not work for long in these oxygen conditions.

Transparent and efficient

With the solution from viastore systems, Sberbank now has a greater transparency about all available files and can access them much more quickly. The processing time for the bank was cut from previously three to four weeks to a few days or even hours. "The new logistic archive center allowed us to reduce the number of staff", explained Gref. "We can now use these employees for other tasks." Sberbank invested a total of around 1.7 billion roubles in this project, corresponding to about 35 million euros. "We now have the very latest system", says German Gref, as he looks optimistically to the future. "By clearing out numerous archive areas at the branches and by saving on logistic costs, this project will, say the economic experts, have already paid for itself after less than two and a half years", he adds happily.



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