Sort™ | ASKO Vest

Sort™ with AGV's for loading and unloading

Published by Synnøve Kjerstad

ASKO is Norway's largest grocery wholesaler and a part of NorgesGruppen. With its 4000 employees and 13 regional warehouses, ASKO ensures effective distribution of products to the grocery, retail convenience goods and institutional catering sectors all around Norway.

ASKO Vest is the regional warehouse for the Vestland Region and the 3rd biggest ASKO warehouse.

Challenges

ASKO Vest has been through a tremendous growth in the last few years with increasing pressure on the return packaging department.

Need for efficiency, increase consistency in the pallet sorting combined with the challenge of the manual process being repetitive and low value for the operators pushed ASKO Vest to explore light automation solutions.

Solution

Sort™ Compact with 1 sorting robot
Up to 300 pallets quality checked and sorted every hour
2 infeeds for redundance and peek hours
10 outfeeds, included 1 for rejected pallets
2 AGV’s for pallets loading and unloading with delivery to pick point in the warehouse

Benefits

The end to end streamlined process allowed for sorting of 1,1 million pallets in the first 12 months. In the same period, ASKO Vest reallocated 2 employees to other departments and saw a drastic improvement in quality of both sorting and stacking.

Following the successful pilot project at ASKO Vest, 3 additional ASKO regional warehouses have installed Sort™ and more to come.

Pallets per hour

300

AGV's

2

Surface

116 sqm

“It’s working, no need to think about it anymore and the Toyota AGV's are well connected. Working full time for 2 shifts with 2 AGV's. And if things happen, we are very well taken care of!”