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

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

The coronavirus pandemic has brought us another, completely unexpected horror scenario: Despite full warehouses, Amazon France, for example, had to close its logistics centers due to a court ruling regarding coronavirus safety measures. The court had determined that employees were not adequately protected against the dangers of the coronavirus.

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 need to be removed from the warehouse quickly today.

Full automation would have prevented this. Even Amazon, the leader in research spending, which is driving the expansion of its robotics and thus accelerating 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

A buffer warehouse, also known as a short-term storage facility, is a temporary storage location for goods. It is this temporary storage that distinguishes it from permanent storage locations. Goods are not assigned fixed storage locations; instead, they are simply "parked" there until they are needed for the next process step – for example, production or order picking. The warehouse is thus located between two successive process stages. Since not every process proceeds at the same speed, the individual goods must be stored securely and in a way that allows for easy retrieval, even in this scenario, as this is the only way to ensure smooth operations. However, a buffer warehouse can also prove economically advantageous if goods need to be stored temporarily for extended periods and in large quantities because they cannot be processed immediately due to time constraints or organizational reasons. In this case, the buffer warehouse serves as temporary storage until the goods are requested by the individual production stations.

Suitable for:

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

To ensure the availability of items at the production or packaging line, carousel storage systems, with their capacity for thousands of items, are particularly well-suited for use as buffer storage. While in an automated small parts warehouse (AS/RS) each item must be individually stored and retrieved from static shelves, the goods in a carousel storage system are stored in a minimal space and can be automatically and efficiently transported to the picking area via the shortest possible route. This principle of delivering goods directly to the person not only saves time and space but also optimizes the ergonomic conditions for warehouse workers. 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 for the order in which the items are retrieved. Using this virtual sorting, the shortest route is calculated for each item, ensuring that multiple orders can be processed simultaneously.

Suitable for:

• CO2 neutrality with photovoltaics – Learn from Amazon

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

Possible areas of application would be:

Cooling:
Several suppliers offer air conditioning solutions as cooling systems for buffer storage order picking systems, making them particularly attractive for suppliers and manufacturers of frozen goods. The core of the system consists of the manufacturer's carousel storage units, in which the items are automatically temporarily stored and sorted according to a customizable process flow. After the chilled goods arrive at the distribution center, the pallets are first divided into individual units (batches). Following pre-sorting, these are placed on trays, where they are then stored in the carousel storage units. The carousel storage unit serves as a buffer storage system, which can optionally operate at constant ambient temperatures, for example, the typical range for frozen foods between -25 and -28°C. To maintain the cold chain, a consistent temperature must be maintained inside the storage unit at all times. For this purpose, airlock doors are installed before and after the access openings, which drastically reduce air exchange during storage and retrieval.

Fire Protection:
To protect stored parts from fire hazards, customers often demand effective fire protection. One supplier, for example, uses its innovative Fire Solution , which employs a residue-free inert gas for fire suppression. The unique feature of this solution is that nozzles spaced 5 centimeters apart along the entire height of the high-bay warehouse deliver the gas directly into the storage units at a low pressure of approximately 4 bar. This allows the gas to disperse quickly, rapidly reducing the oxygen content to below 8.8 percent, thus 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. However, a fire suppression system is only as good as its detection system: Plastic pipes constantly draw air from inside the shuttle and analyze it for smoke particles. If a certain threshold is exceeded, an alarm is triggered, and the gas supply is automatically activated.

Preliminary Humidification:
Often, semi-finished products require a certain level of humidity to be sufficiently flexible for further processing. This can be achieved by selectively absorbing water from the parts in a buffer storage area. Using controllers to regulate water supply and temperature, the process air in the storage lift can be set to, for example, 25 °C and a relative humidity of 65%, resulting in the desired humidification effect. After this process step, the now malleable parts can be transferred to the next production stage.

Preliminary Cooling:
Parts from pre-production are often too hot to be processed immediately. Therefore, they require buffering areas where they can dissipate their elevated surface temperature. To achieve this, the parts are placed on special, heat-resistant trays and moved into the storage lift. To allow the hot parts to cool down more quickly in the buffer storage area, the warm air in the lift is continuously extracted via a factory exhaust system, enabling the manufacturer to process them further or prepare them for shipping more quickly.

However, as is true everywhere in industry, the best systems are of little use without efficient control software – the manual operation of the highly complex devices and processes is simply 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-bay warehouse (HLR)

More about it here:

• High-bay warehouse (HBW)

Automatic small parts warehouse (AKL)

More about it here:

• Automated small parts warehouse (AS/RS) – Automatic mini-load system – Vertical Buffer System / Module