Designing and building a 1 million-square-foot warehouse is a daunting task. For a leading distributor of industrial goods, the stakes were high to deliver flawless order fulfillment for customers throughout the United States and internationally. That’s why this distributor planned to create the largest goods-to-person automated system in the world.
The distributor’s newest automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS)—which consists of a variety of computer-controlled systems that automatically place and retrieve items from defined storage locations—would be a critical part of the new facility’s success. This new system would have several hundred thousand individual tote storage locations, with more than 1 million storage compartments (achieved through tote subdivision).