Frischdienst Walther from Kitzingen has an extensive range of fresh and frozen products as well as foodstuffs. With over 8,500 items, the company supplies Franconian restaurants, hotels and commercial kitchens. The automation challenge: the technology covers three different temperature ranges and three different product flows. The automated deep-freeze warehouse with an ambient temperature of -22°C, which was completed in 2016, was extended to provide a total of 19,680 tray storage locations in future. The new automated fresh goods warehouse with a temperature range of 2°C to 6°C is equipped as a shuttle warehouse with three KlinCAT multilevel shuttles, each of which reaches six container levels. The dry goods warehouse for food is a non-air-conditioned, 2-aisle, automated small parts warehouse for B, C and D articles.

Due to the wide variety of packaging designs, trays are used as loading aids in all three storage areas. The separation of products from pallets onto trays enables flexible and simple handling of orders with small batch sizes and mixed assortments. According to the company, the shuttle warehouse provides 30 percent more capacity than the automated small parts warehouse despite requiring half the space. This solution helps to speed up the internal material flow, especially for fast-moving fresh goods such as fresh dairy products, cheese specialties and fresh meat. The shuttle warehouse also serves as an order consolidation buffer. Pre-picking is used to temporarily store orders for dispatch so that they can be merged with goods from other storage areas at a later date. The new deep-freeze conveyor technology and a further order picking station are connected to the existing system in such a way that the distances are as short as possible and the loss of cold as well as the heat and moisture input are kept extremely low.

The Klinkhammer warehouse management software has been expanded to include the management of the dry and fresh goods warehouse and connected to the existing host system. The actual net weights can be recorded for weighed goods, such as venison legs with different individual weights. The Klinkhammer warehouse management software with material flow computer controls the processes. The KlinkVision visualization system brings transparency to the warehouse and enables fast remote maintenance.