Bell Food Group trusts in TGW

The currently decentralized logistics will be brought together at one location with the help of the high-performance system. This will not only significantly reduce costs, but also increase the service level for customers. Bell also relies on TGW's software expertise: The central element of the project is the connection to SAP EWM.

The Bell Food Group is one of Europe's leading manufacturers of meat and convenience products. Founded in Switzerland in 1869, the food specialist is now part of the Coop Group and most recently generated sales of 4.2 billion Swiss francs. In addition to Bell, Eisberg, Hilcona and Hügli also belong to the group of companies: the product range includes fresh meat, poultry, cold cuts, seafood as well as fresh and long-life convenience products such as ready meals, salads, sandwiches and sauces.

Speed and flexibility as decisive criteria

The new Fulfillment Center is the central picking and distribution platform for fresh, ready-to-sell packaged self-service and service items: It supplies supermarket branches as well as wholesalers and retailers - which places the highest demands on speed and flexibility. The products are delivered from the various Bell production plants and are priced, temporarily stored and picked according to individual customer requirements.

Flexible in the event of changes to the order and customer structure

At the heart of the solution is a two-part shuttle system with 190,000 storage locations, consisting of a picking module with thirteen aisles and an outgoing goods module with eight aisles. More than 400 shuttles handle fast and energy-efficient storage and retrieval. The twelve price labeling lines have a capacity of up to 700,000 sales units per day. This ensures that the goods are picked, palletized and made available for dispatch within around two hours. By using 42 PickCenter One workstations, Bell can react flexibly to changes in the order and customer structure.

The entire empties handling will also be centralized as part of the project. Bell uses a closed container circulation model: used containers, roll containers and pallets are returned by customers to Oensingen for cleaning. On peak days, Bell prepares up to 80,000 containers: they are first automatically depalletized, checked and cleaned. The system then makes them available again for production or the picking process.

SAP EWM for the innovative logistics solution

Bell also relies on TGW expertise in the software sector - with a complete SAP connection. SAP EWM (Extended Warehouse Management) is a powerful software for warehouse management, which can be used to plan, control and monitor manual and automated processes. This enables integrated process handling: from goods receipt to goods issue.

"We are very pleased that we were able to convince Bell of the advantages of our solution," emphasize Johann Steinkellner, CEO Central Europe at TGW, and Thomas Kretz, Managing Director TGW Switzerland. "With the highly automated fulfillment center, Bell benefits from optimal performance with maximum flexibility and bundles its logistics at a central location."