Aug/Sept 2008

How do you find a misplaced item in a large and busy warehouse? It can be a time-wasting and costly irritation for almost any logistics businesses. However, a Hamburg-based operator, Bursped Speditions GmbH, reckons it has cracked the problem.

The company has installed a tracking and monitoring solution combining video monitoring with ultra-wide band (UWB) wireless tracking at its 135,000 sq ft warehouse, and says it has paid for itself within a year.

At the heart of the system is a high-precision tracking system from Ubisense, a UK company which also has a German base. Ubisense uses a system in which items are tagged whilst in the warehouse, and can be tracked by a sensor network that uses UWB wireless. The system shows the location of each item in three dimensions, so it can find the exact pallet position of an item, even in multi-layer racking.

Interestingly, the company already kept surveillance video of warehouse activities, so in the end, by painstakingly trawling through videotapes, staff could usually track down misplaced items; but this process often took hours.

 

Eseg Deutschland of Bornheim, a security systems specialist, conceived the new solution, which combines video with the tracking. When staff enter the details of a missing item on one of three computer terminals, the Ubisense system reports the place and time of the last-known location in the warehouse. Then the system can call up relevant video footage to show the actual location of the item.

Eseg also developed the video picture recording, storage, indexing and management tools, and took overall responsibility for delivery and installation.

For the record, the Hamburg facility handles approximately 3,000 shipments or around 1,000 tonnes of freight every day. Plenty to get lost.