Founded in 2007, TCL Consulting primarily handles products from the world of fashion. What end consumers order in the online stores of the retailer Schuhe Lüke, for example, is picked from TCL Consulting's stocks and delivered as quickly as possible.

Shoe boxes with storage pitfalls
Storing tens of thousands of shoe boxes in conventional shelving racks and picking individual orders has repeatedly presented TCL Consulting with major challenges in the past. Although the fully automated AutoStore small parts warehouse had long been a suitable solution in principle, the standard storage containers used in classic AutoStore systems, with external heights of 220 or 330 mm and internal dimensions of 403 x 603 mm each, simply offered too little space for their use to make any significant progress. This is because shoe boxes are always labeled on the narrow side, so it only makes sense to store them upright in an AutoStore system so that the retrieved items can be easily scanned before they are removed. The desire for higher standard containers was well known to the AutoStore inventors. However, handling them initially required the development of a new robot series. Since last year, however, both 425 mm containers and more powerful robots have been available. Compared to robots from the R5 RedLine series, the new B1 BlackLine robots achieve a higher speed of 4 m/s (R5: 3.1 m/s) as well as a higher acceleration (1.4 m/s compared to 0.8 m/s).

TCL Consulting was the first user in Germany to order an AutoStore system with B1 BlackLine robots. In a newly constructed hall complex, AM-Automation, as the leading national AutoStore distributor, installed a storage system in which up to 10,000 containers, each with an external height of 425 mm and internal dimensions of 406 x 403 x 603 mm (H/W/D), can be accommodated. The system comprises a total of 14 levels on a base area of 24 x 17 m and thus reaches a total height of a good eight meters. At the top of the system - the so-called grid - eight B1 BlackLine robots take over the fully automatic storage and retrieval of the containers.

The system went into operation at the beginning of the year and TCL Consulting is completely satisfied with the result of the investment. With the new robots and the higher bins, AutoStore has proven itself in every respect, according to the company management, and creating such high storage capacities in such a small space is hardly conceivable in any other way. The individual items are picked in the AutoStore system from TCL Consulting via three workstations, which are specially designed as so-called carousel ports for high throughput rates and enable an average of up to 300 container deliveries per hour. If required, the AutoStore solution also offers plenty of "room for improvement" in that additional workstations can be set up or further automation is possible, for example through the direct integration of conveyor technology.