Buffer storage: For e-commerce, retail and manufacturing industries

Do you need competent support in implementing your requirements? Do you have questions about Smart Factory, Smart Logistics or digitalization?

Advice and solutions can be found here 👈🏻

The automation of warehouses and supply chains is an essential element of warehouse optimization. We support you in this.

Advice and solutions can be found here 👈🏻

E-commerce has special requirements and competition is becoming ever stronger. It is not for nothing that e-commerce is considered the driver of changes in the market. With our digital know-how, innovative solutions and implementations are our strength.

Get in touch with us 👈🏻

Buffer warehouse warehouse employee – Image: wavebreakmedia|Shutterstock.com

With the Corona pandemic, we encountered another and completely unexpected horror scenario: Despite full warehouses, Amazon France, for example, had to close its logistics centers due to a court ruling on Corona protective measures. The court found that the employees were not adequately protected against coronavirus risks.

Suitable for:

• The Corona pandemic and its effects on key industries: What you need to do now
• An example of full automation: If the goods have to get out of the warehouse quickly today

Full automation would have prevented this. Even Amazon, which is the leader in research spending, is its robotics and is therefore pushing its automation , did not foresee this scenario. The fact that such fully automated systems are already in use is not new .

Suitable for:

• The future of logistics centers
• Local decentralized hubs

The buffer warehouse, also known as short-term storage, is a temporary storage location for stored goods. It is the temporary accommodation that distinguishes them from final storage sites. No fixed storage locations are assigned to the goods; instead, they are simply “parked” there until they are made available for the next process step – for example production or picking. The warehouse is therefore located between two successive process stages. Since not every process runs at the same speed, the individual stored goods must also be stored safely and easily in this variant, because this is the only way to ensure a smooth process. But even if the stored goods have to be temporarily stored for a longer period of time and in large quantities because they cannot be further processed immediately for time or organizational reasons, a buffer warehouse can prove to be economically sensible. In this case, the buffer warehouse serves as an interim storage facility until the goods are requested from the individual production stations.

Suitable for:

• Warehouse optimization methods: Warehouse optimization with order picking: 5 steps to more productivity with optimized order picking
• Contract logistics – service providers for logistics – 80% of all larger companies use them!

In order to ensure the availability of items at the production or packaging system, circulation racks with space for many thousands of items are particularly suitable for use as buffer storage. While in an automatic small parts warehouse (AKL) each item has to be stored and removed individually from the static shelves, the goods are stored in the smallest space in the circulation rack and can be transported to picking automatically and in a space-saving manner over the shortest route. The principle of delivering the goods to the person not only saves time and space, but also optimizes the ergonomic conditions of the workers in the warehouse. The system is supported by sophisticated software that optimizes the solution for efficiency. For example, a packing pattern generator can create an optimal plan in advance as to the order in which the items will be removed from storage. This virtual sorting is used to calculate the shortest route for each item and ensures that multiple orders can be processed in parallel at the same time.

Suitable for:

• CO2 neutrality with photovoltaics – Learn from Amazon

In addition to using the buffer storage for items without special requirements regarding their storage conditions, they can also be converted for a variety of goods with special requirements for the type of storage.

Possible areas of application would be:

Cooling
There are various providers with an air conditioning solution as a cooling system for buffer warehouse picking systems, which makes it particularly interesting for suppliers and manufacturers of frozen goods. The heart of the system are the manufacturer's circulation racks, in which the items are automatically temporarily stored and sorted according to an individually adaptable process flow. After the chilled goods are delivered to the distribution center, the pallets are first divided into individual units (batches). After pre-sorting, these are placed on the trays on which they are then stored in the storage paternosters. The circulation rack serves as a buffer storage, which optionally operates at constant ambient temperatures, for example the usual range between -25 and -28°C for frozen food. In order not to interrupt the cold chain, there must always be a constant temperature inside the warehouse. For this purpose, air lock doors are installed in front of and behind the operating openings, which drastically reduce the air exchange during storage and retrieval.

Fire protection
In order to protect stored parts from the risk of fire, customers often require effective fire protection. One provider, for example, uses its innovative Fire Solution , in which a residue-free inert gas is used to fight fires. The special thing about the solution: There are nozzles at a distance of 5 centimeters over the entire height of the high-bay warehouse, which direct the gas directly into the storage units at a low pressure of around 4 bar. This allows the gas to spread quickly and the oxygen content quickly drops below 8.8 percent, extinguishing the fire in a very short time. Due to the low pressure at which the inert gas is introduced, the stored goods are not damaged. But an extinguishing system is only as good as its reporting system: plastic pipes constantly suck in air from the interior of the shuttle and examine it for smoke particles. If a certain limit value is exceeded, an alarm is given and the gas supply starts automatically.

Preparatory humidification
Preliminary products often require a certain level of humidity in order to be sufficiently flexible for further processing. This can be done by selectively absorbing water into the parts in a buffer store. Using controllers to control water supply and temperature, the process air in the storage lift can be set, for example, to 25 °C and a humidity of 65%, which leads to the desired humidification effect. After going through this process step, the now formable parts can be passed on to the next production stage.

Preparatory cooling
Parts from pre-production are often too hot to be processed further immediately. That's why they need places where they can be buffered and release their increased surface temperature. To achieve this, the parts are pushed into the storage lift on special, heat-resistant trays and stored. So that the hot parts in the buffer storage can cool down more quickly, the warm air in the storage elevator is continuously extracted via a hall exhaust system, which enables the producer to process them more quickly or prepare them for shipping.

But as is true everywhere in industry, the best systems are of little use if there is no efficient control software - the manual operation of highly complex devices and processes is too prone to errors to meet the demands of efficient management.

Suitable for:

Automated storage and retrieval system – AS/RS (Automatic storage and retrieval systems)

More about it here:

• Rack storage – Storage and shelving systems – Automated storage and retrieval systems – Automated storage and retrieval system – AS/RS (Automatic storage and retrieval systems)

High rack warehouse (HLR)

More about it here:

• High-bay warehouse (HBW)

Automatic small parts warehouse (AKL)

More about it here:

• Automatic small parts warehouse (AKL) – Automatic mini-load system – Vertical Buffer System / Modules