TCL Consulting with Fully Automated AutoStore Solution for Logistics

TCL Consulting GmbH takes care of fulfillment for a variety of renowned clients in B2C e-commerce: From warehousing to order picking and shipping to returns management. With a fully automated AutoStore solution, the company from Umkirch (Baden-Württemberg) has now made significant progress in optimizing order processing.

(Offenau) – Founded in 2007, TCL Consulting primarily handles products from the fashion world. Bags and clothing are included, as well as various accessories – but the absolute focus is on shoes. What end consumers order, for example, from the online shops of the retailer Schuhe Lüke, is picked from the inventory of TCL Consulting and delivered as quickly as possible.

Shoe Boxes with Storage Challenges

Storing thousands of shoe boxes in conventional shelf systems and picking individual orders has repeatedly posed significant challenges for TCL Consulting in the past. While business success on one side grew, so did the time spent on the manual handling of increasingly larger inventories. “In detail, we were able to achieve optimizations thanks to KVP time and again, but the big breakthrough was still pending,” reports Dominic Peters, Head of Logistics at TCL Consulting. Although a fully automatic small parts warehouse AutoStore had been available for some time, the standard storage containers used in classic AutoStore systems offered simply too little space with external heights of 220 or 330 mm and internal dimensions of 403 x 603 mm each, so that their use would not have brought about significant progress. Because: Shoe boxes are fundamentally labeled on the narrow side – thus, their storage in an AutoStore system only makes sense vertically, so that the retrieved items can still be conveniently scanned before removal.

Taller Containers, Faster Robots

The desire for taller standard containers was well known to the Norwegian AutoStore inventors. However, their handling initially required the development of a new robot series – the previously used vehicles of the R5 RedLine type were not designed for the new requirements. Since last year, both 425 mm containers and more powerful robots have been available. Compared to robots of the R5 RedLine series, the new B1 BlackLine robots achieve a higher speed of 4 m/s (R5: 3.1 m/s) as well as a higher acceleration (1.4 m/s compared to 0.8 m/s).TCL Consulting did not hesitate and ordered an AutoStore system with B1 BlackLine robots as the first user in Germany. In a newly constructed hall complex, AM-Automation, as the leading national AutoStore distributor, installed a storage system that can accommodate up to 10,000 containers with an external height of 425 mm and internal dimensions of 406 x 403 x 603 mm (H/W/D). The system covers a base area of 24 x 17 m and has a total of 14 levels, reaching a total height of over eight meters. On the top of the system – the so-called Grid – eight B1 BlackLine series robots take over the fully automated storage and retrieval of the containers.

Plenty of “Room for Growth”

At the beginning of the year, the system went into operation, and TCL Consulting is completely satisfied with the results of the investment. With the new robots and taller containers, AutoStore has proven itself in every respect, according to the company’s management, and creating such high storage capacities in such a small space is hardly conceivable in any other way. The picking of individual items in the AutoStore system of TCL Consulting takes place over three workstations, which are specifically designed for high throughput and allow an average of up to 300 container services per hour.

AutoStore Grows Seamlessly

Time-consuming paths and the manual collection of boxes from shelf systems are now a thing of the past for TCL Consulting. And if needed, the AutoStore solution also offers plenty of “room for growth” by allowing additional workstations to be set up or further automation, such as direct integration of conveyor technology. “As a company, if we continue to grow, AutoStore grows seamlessly with us,” summarizes Dominic Peters, “for order processing in e-commerce, this is the ideal solution.”https://www.tcl-consulting.dePhoto: © TCL Consulting GmbH