In our continued look at ProModel for AutoCAD, Inventor, and Factory Design Utilities, we take a look at Warehouse Optimization. (Click here for the previous post)
In this example, a customer is looking to validate truck unloading. They have snow blowers and tractors to unload in a 10 hour shift. As we can see, the layout consists of Factory Design Utility assets representing the racks, as well as the forktruck in the lower right that will do the unloading tasks.
We can create the product flows right in the AutoCAD drawing that represents the proposed layout. ProModel’s easy to use interfaced allow us to rapidly create the simulation. We first add locations – these would be where the fork truck will put away the items – and specify how many can be loaded into each rack.
We’ll next specify the path that the fork trucks will follow to put away the products. Each dot represents where the forktruck will stop – and the connection lines give the paths to follow. We then tell ProModel which location ties to which stop for the fork truck.
We will now specify flows for each of our products – the tractors and the snow blowers. We’ll do the tractors first as they are in the back of the truck and must be unloaded to get to the snow blowers. We’ll select where we pick up the tractor and then specify which racks the worker should use for putting the tractors away. We’ll do the same for the snow blowers – using a different flow along the same path network. Using the simulation browser, it’s easy to see the from – to relationships for each product.
We can now assign a resource to the tasks – in this case a forktruck – which will follow the path networks we created. Note that we can specify speed, acceleration, deceleration – all in the interest of getting an accurate result.
Now it comes time to simulate the system using one forklift in a 10 hour shift. Where we can actively watch the truck’s inventory is counting down – and the floor inventory is increasing on each rack location. At the end of 10 hrs in this scenario all tractors (orange) are unloaded, but we have unloaded only 5 snowblowers (red).
We can try different solutions to the problem using the scenario manager. For example simulating with two forktrucks instead of just one or with any number of other parameters. We can run as many of these scenarios as we wish and compare multiple scenarios.
In scenario 2, we have unloaded all of the tractors at about 5 hours, leaving us plenty of time to unload the snow blowers.
We can open a configurable report that shows graphically a comparison of the two scenarios – and the user can customize this report to display any information they feel important to convey their message.
Because we used the Factory Design Utilities – a 3D representation of our design is literally one click away. Once opened in Inventor, the user can show the simulation in 3D as well – again, a simple, one button click!
ProModel has the ability to handle much more complicated tasks as well – in this case, the trucks are being unloaded, materials being staged, and then put away by another pallet jack operator. From this we can do manpower studies, efficiency studies, and see effects of new products entering the system – easily.
Watch the entire process here and be sure to reach out to us to see how this ProModel scenario can help your Warehouse Optimization efforts!
