Kuehne + Nagel

Kuehne + Nagel is a global transport and logistics company founded in 1890. It provides sea freight and airfreight forwarding as well as contract logistics.

Industry: 3PL

Location: Netherlands

Challenges:

At the distribution center in Utrecht, the objective was to achieve intelligent material flow control for storage and retrieval, picking, and cross-docking. This meant:

• Automating the task of picking layers of food products 
• Taking into account the widely differing shapes of products

Solutions Implemented:

Layer-picking robots automate the task of picking layers of food products directly from source pallets and transferring them to target pallets, regardless of shape, packaging type, and stacking pattern. To accomplish this, Keuhne + Nagel implemented:

• Layer Picker® Flex-R

Benefits:

After successful installations of layer pickers in two sites, Kuehne + Nagel was able to achieve the productivity and flexibility it had been seeking. This meant:

• Increasing throughput per hour to 220 pallets
• Installing two more layer pickers in Utrecht