The client who operates a conveyor equipment used for the logistics of goods, reached us with the request to develop an application to monitor their processes, generate monitoring reports and act responsively – relocate site workers in case of a goods jam – with the aim to optimize their processes.
Our client is a nation-wide delivery corporation that operates a goods sorting terminal which is of a two-three stadiums size. It is equipped with the conveyor belt system developed by the Dutch company Vanderlande. The key element of this system is a scratch code scanner. The scanner allows workers to register goods within a few seconds, it defines goods’ size and weight, sorts the data and suggests which line to direct the goods to.
The slide of the conveyor belts could be either slowed down or accelerated by managers depending on the situation, an intensity of the load. Special lamps of the conveyor signal if a bottleneck occurs. Although, it was rather a challenge for our client to recognize a goods jam just in time for the managers to relocate site workers respectively to sort out goods.
Our discovery process revealed that the workload of our client’s site workers turned out to be unbalanced. A conveyor operator could have been either too busy or had no work at all. Our goal was to implement a monitoring system that is capable to smooth the employees’ workload and optimize the alert signals of the conveyor belts VS site workers relocation process.
Infinity Technologies developed and implemented an application that tracks all of the transporting stages of goods providing the load, and detects stress areas when that is the case.
The solution runs a transport stress detection algorithm, generates corresponding reports and alerts managers when needed. According to our algorithm, the reports quantify the percentage of the stress on the conveyor belt. Then, the application makes visual recommendations on the screens of relevant managers.
For instance, providing 600 employees work within one terminal in three shifts and groups of 10-20 employees are subordinate to one manager who monitors the terminal on their screen, the visualization of busy areas is helpful. We painted the map of each terminal in 9 different colours, each colour representing varied stress levels of a peculiar sector.
The solution provided allows managers to assess the type of the problem in seconds, compare sectors of the conveyor belts, and make optimal decisions. By sending a message to employees within our application, managers are capable to relocate them and fix overloads efficiently.
Infinity Technologies offered its client, a nation-wide logistics operator, a solution that has optimized their automated warehouse processes. With the help of our solution, it takes now seconds for a conveyor operator to notice and classify a goods jam, assess the situation and send available employees to fix it.
By balancing efficiently the workload of employees who can now sort the load on the conveyor belts smoothly and orchestrated by their managers, the teams witnessed the boom of their delivery performance. Over-the-average performance not only grants bonus payments to employees, but also generates additional revenue from the corporate perspective.
12 months for the MVP
