Flexibility – a motto of PostNord

Customer case: PostNord

PostNord offers communications and logistics solutions in the Nordic region. Third Party Logistics needs high flexibility in picking. Their customers have different kinds of products in different sizes that should be able to be picked in the same trolley. With angled shelves and a engine that drives the trolley, PostNord manages to meet their customers’ needs.

In 2015 PostNord delivered 130 million packages around the Nordic region. Some of them were sent from Ättekulla industrial center in Helsingborg, Sweden, where PostNord has one of its large warehouses.
Products from Nestlé, Nutricia and Dolce Gusto are on the shelves of the warehouse. For example, nutritional drinks, baby food cans and baby formula.
From here, they send directly to e-commerce customers, but also to shops.

The packing of coffee capsules

In a corner of the warehouse, a number of people are packing coffee capsules at a furious pace. Lamps lights up above the boxes of capsules to be picked. The system is called ”pick-from-light” and keeps track of how many capsules of each variety to be packed in each box.
The personnel vary their work by switching workstations. After the coffee picking they take an order pick round in the large warehouse. This way the work becomes more varied.

" – Helge Nybergs' solution with angled shelves and motorized trolleys, satisfy our customers needs."

Damir Knezevic, production manager PostNord

Electric engine on the trolleys

When the order picking starts, the trolley is filled with boxes that are available in three different sizes. The shelves of the trolley are angled, which makes it easier to reach into and it becomes an ergonomic advantage to have shelves that way.
To pack directly in the delivery boxes provides PostNord efficiency, they don’t need to repack the boxes to be sent to the customer.
On a round with a trolley there is room for boxes of up to 30 customers. The loading surface on a trolley is about 5.5 m2. A fully loaded trolley can weigh up to 500 kg.
To be able to manage such a heavy load on a round, the trolleys are equipped with electric drive. This means the personnel easily push or pull the trolley without having to use any muscle power.
– Helge Nyberg’s solution with angled shelves and motorized trolleys, satisfy our customers’ needs, says Damir Knezevic, who is production manager at PostNord in Helsingborg.
– The engine has made the order picking even more effectively.

Scanner on the glove

There is a computer in each trolley which keeps track of the orders and boxes. The picker has a glove with a scanner on the finger that makes it smooth and easy to scan the goods so that they end up in the right box.
The trolleys are appreciated by the personnel, who find its easy to operate them, even though they are almost two meters long. And they like that it’s possible to turn the trolley around its own axis, even if the load is heavy.