End users have been looking for a way to automate mixed-SKU palletizing and each picking for years. In the right applications, those solutions are within reach now.

Manual palletizing is one of the most labor intensive and expensive operations in a warehouse or distribution center. You not only have the cost of labor to build the pallets, you may also have the worker’s compensation costs associated with back and shoulder injuries.

With the right volumes, automatic palletizers, robotic palletizers and layer pickers are cost-effective alternatives for building single SKU pallets and rainbow pallets--that’s a mixed-SKU pallet that alternates products by layers.

But the Holy Grail of picking has been to design a system that can automatically build mixed-SKU pallets that have more than one SKU in a layer. Traditionally, that has been a challenge, which is why most companies still throw a lot of warm bodies at the problem. But now a handful of materials handling automation solution providers, including Witron, Schaefer Systems International and Axium, have completed the quest and discovered the Holy Grail for building mixed SKU pallets.

What’s driving this quest?

“Whether you’re a manufacturer or a distribution center shipping directly to a retailer, you simply don’t want to buy more inventory than you need just because it fits better on a pallet,” says Frank Carzoli, the director of sales, marketing and business development for Axium. “They only want what they need and how you put it on a pallet is your problem.”

While each of these companies has its own secret sauce to how they build a mixed pallet, typically they involve some kind of palletizing cell with a system to sequence the order of the cartons, conveyor to deliver the cartons in and out of the cell, robotic palletizers to pick the product and place it on the pallet and sophisticated software to pull it all together.

To put it all together…The software analyzes an order to determine how many pallets will be needed to fill the order, what products will go in to the order, what order they need to be placed on the pallet and where they will be positioned on the pallet.

What’s more, these systems can take characteristics of the product into consideration before building the pallet. “If you’re shipping to a food retailer, you don’t want to have fruit on the bottom of a pallet underneath the detergent,” says Carzoli. “The system can take things like crushability or pallet integrity into consideration as it builds the pallets.”

Load a store planogram into the system, and the software can build a pallet with the product for a specific aisle in a specific store, streamlining putaway operations in the store.

The ROI, Carszoli says, goes beyond labor savings.

• Intelligently built mixed pallets are less likely to shift during shipment, reducing product damage;
• Pallets are more consistent and more likely to make the most of the shipping cube of a trailer; and,
• Because of the discipline imposed by the system, it’s more difficult to ship mistakes, reducing charge-backs from retailers.

The next step: Automated piece picking, says Carzoli. While no one has yet purchased a system, Axium has developed a turnkey solution that can automatically pick individual items from a conveyor to a shipping carton. “The technology is actually the same as building a pallet,” says Carzoli. “And we’re targeting the same market--consumer products in high volume and different sizes. We’re just looking for the right customer to implement the solution.”