Novità

The warehouse of the World leading diamond-mining company goes live with AXELOT WMS X5

19.02.2021

AXELOT was selected as an executor of the WMS implementation project at a 100,000 square meter facility consisting of multiple material supply warehouses of ALROSA, located in the city of Lensk, Russia.

As part of the pilot project, the operations of the material supply warehouses were taken under control of Axelot WMS X5, taking into account the specifics of the customer - a large number of goods and materials, various types of sites and their territorial distribution.

ALROSA is the world's leader in the diamond mining industry, a Russian state-owned mining company aimed at comprehensively addressing national goals in the area of natural resource extraction.

ALROSA is the world's largest producer of diamonds in carats, accounting for 26% of World and about 90% of Russian diamond production. The main activity of the company is concentrated in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the Arkhangelsk region of Russia, as well as on the African continent.

Having become a most successful bidder, AXELOT was selected as an executor of the WMS implementation project at a 100,000 square meter facility consisting of multiple material supply warehouses of ALROSA, located in the city of Lensk, Russia. The site hosts different kinds of storages: open-air, heated covered, unheated covered. At the same time, the objects are located at a distance from each other, and operation at open-air storages is carried out year-round. In total the site stores around 35,000 stock items.

Thanks to the fruitful cooperation of AXELOT and ALROSA project teams, a successful pilot project was completed, which made it possible to create a reliable basis for optimizing the warehouse logistics of a large mining company, taking into account all the specifics.

Background and objectives of the project

Previously, ALROSA kept warehouse records in the corporate information system. However, any classic ERP-system without additional functional modules or large-scale modifications is not capable of solving warehouse management tasks at the level of WMS class systems. It has to be noted that warehouse load tracking and warehouse management in real time (one of the main tasks of WMS) are two very different processes. The company’s goal was to quickly obtain information about operations in the warehouse and its condition, load address tracking, reduce errors and automatically identify goods and materials. The first choice was to use an existing ERP system to achieve these goals. However, it appeared to be quite challenging especially when it came to the need to enable system-guided operations. Thus a clear need to deploy a specialized WMS was identified.

AXELOT already had experience in implementing a WMS at material supply warehouses of large mining companies, therefore Axelot consultants involved in the project were able to act quickly taking into account the specifics of the warehouse, define key goals of the project and ways to achieve them. It should be noted that the warehouse is located in the northern territories of Russia, therefore, the delivery of goods can be cumbersome. For example, it is only in the summertime when all necessary items for the domestic needs of miners (clothing, personal hygiene items, household chemicals, etc.) as well as professional needs of mining divisions (everything from tools and spare parts to explosives and drilling rigs) is delivered to the warehouses. This is a huge number of different items (arriving at the warehouse in a short time) with their own specifics, which must be taken into account when organizing storage and accounting in the warehouse.

In addition to the tasks of load tracking and management, it was important that the traceability of goods was ensured, the control of warehouse operations was established, so that information about goods and materials in warehouses was available in real time, and the management had operative and reliable data for timely management decisions.

In addition, it was important to optimize the use of resources - personnel, equipment, warehouse space. And, of course, it was necessary to minimize the number of errors caused by the human factor, as well as to increase the accuracy and productivity of warehouse workers which could be achieved also thanks to increasing the efficiency and speed of document flow.

Project overview

The project was completed on a turnkey basis. AXELOT specialists carried out a logistics audit and drew up an optimal concept for the development of warehouse facilities. The necessary warehouse equipment was supplied as part of the project. Implementation of a WMS system, development of integration with ERP, testing and pilot production - all these stages were carried out in close cooperation with the customer's team.

Considering the number of dedicated sites, it was decided to scale the WMS into warehouses and zones in stages, which made it possible to optimally plan the debugging of the system and integration mechanisms, changes in business processes and user training. At the same time, a number of cross-cutting needs were resolved within the framework of the pilot project:

• For each type of storage and product group, the project team developed and configured separate load handling mechanisms.
  
• For work in open areas in the winter period, the possibility of using various work technologies has been laid down - it is possible to use both mobile equipment for identifying goods and »paper« technology where the use of automatic identification technologies is cumbersome.
  
• The mobile solution supports the ability to work using both 4G technology and Wi-Fi, and the equipment is selected in such a way that switching between 4G and Wi-Fi is carried out automatically depending on the signal quality.
  
• Integration of the WMS-system with the corporate accounting system is implemented in the classical way with division into »master« and »slave«. The flexibility of AXELOT WMS X5 made it possible to adapt the system to the main ERP business processes in such a way that the analysis of primary documentation and the formation of consolidated reporting are available in the corporate information system.

WMS implementation results and plans

The objectives set before the start of the pilot project have been successfully achieved. At the ALROSA warehouse in Lensk, the influence of the human factor has been reduced and the accuracy of order picking has been increased. The efficiency of reflecting changes in balances by warehouses and zones has been increased. In general, all the main technological processes of the warehouse are now automated and controlled by the WMS.

At the moment, work is underway to switch to total labeling with barcodes, which will increase the speed and accuracy of item identification when working with goods and materials. Various group barcodes will contain all the necessary information about the product, which will allow organizing fast good-faith receiving process when moving goods between warehouses.