Food firm selects Swisslog for new automated distribution centre

The distribution centre will be built for Coop Norway´s rapidly growing retail and e-commerce sales within the non-food segments such as building materials, sports, electronics and home products.

“We conducted a comprehensive tendering process with high demands for cost-efficiency, flexibility and scalability. Swisslog turned out to be the automation provider that best met our demands”, says Henning Røberg, Coop Norway’s project manager for its Langhus distribution centre.

Coop Norway’s Non Food segments has been growing rapidly and with great success for many years and the new distribution centre is a prerequisite for further strong and profitable growth.

“We need to invest in more warehouse capacity, efficiency and flexibility. Swisslog presented the best concept, with a robust and flexible design based on proven technology”, says Henning Røberg.

Swisslog’s concept has been designed to utilise all the available areas in the building, the best possible way. The automated warehouse solutions consists of an automated high-bay warehouse with 48.500 pallet locations, Vectura stacker cranes, conveyor systems, pick locations/stations and an automated high-bay warehouse with Tornado miniload-cranes serving 75.000 carton locations. The operation will therefore be able to handle small, large and over-sized items through a combination of manual and automated processes.

The entire solution will be controlled and supported by Swisslog’s modular SynQ WMS. The SynQ software has best practice functionality for control of both manual and automated processes, including; order strategies, customised building of customer pallets, extended cockpit functionality and yard management.

“We are extremely pleased and proud that Coop Norway decided to choose Swisslog as their automation partner for this strategic project”, says Lars Hultén, CEO Swisslog Nordics.

To optimise the lifecycle of this project, the cooperation will also include a System Operation contract providing Coop with a combination of on-site engineers as well as software support expertise. The Swisslog team will take responsibility for the ongoing technical performance and maintenance of the intralogistics operation. In collaboration with Coop, they will also work on continuous improvements to ensure that the system develops in line with the business’s evolving requirements.

The high-bay warehouse is already in the construction phase. The automation and IT systems will be implemented from autumn 2019 allowing the new distribution centre to be in full operation at the beginning of 2021.