Smart warehouse gets smarter to meet growing demand

26th February 2016

Mick Elliott

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An extra 250,000 square feet has been added to Mouser Electronics global distribution facilities. The extra capacity is needed to meet the demands of strong worldwide growth, which the distributor says is significantly in excess of the industry average. Some eye catching statsitics include more than 2.5 miles of conveyor system, 10,766 average daily orders shipped and 41,044 average daily lines pulled. In 2015 1.8bn pieces were picked and on time arrival success rate was 99 per cent.

Already pretty smart, says Mouser modestly, the new Mouser warehouse will be even smarter. New equipment, including a new mobile app for the warehouse management system, a state-of-the-art packing machine and a heavy duty turret truck for maximising palette storage, makes it easier for the company to serve its expanding customer base – more than 520,000 Engineers & buyers around the world.

Receiving has moved to the new building where 20 stations have been added to handle the thousands of boxes that arrive daily.

There are 18 huge receiving/shipping doors for Fed-Ex, UPS, DHL and other transport trucks to pull up.

Conveyor belts now take the incoming inventory, sort it and send it to the receivers’ station to be entered.

“We’ve re-designed it to truly be ‘smart receiving,’” said Tina Sears, Mouser Vice President of Warehouse Operations. “The goal is to accommodate growth and maximise efficiency.”

Order pullers will soon use iPads to access a new, mobile app that will link to the Mouser Warehouse Management System for processing. The custom interface is designed to be very intuitive and easy to use for faster order pulling.

A high-tech, automated packing machine helps speed up packing and shipping of small orders. “The improvements already are helping us greatly,” added Sears. “As we transition to a 24-hour inbound and outbound operation, the warehouse will continue to evolve, and we are staying flexible so that we can evolve as needed to meet our business needs.”

Commented Graham Maggs (pictured), Mouser’s director of marketing for EMEA: “The new warehouse is phenomenal. We needed the space to handle our new business and to allow for continued expansion. With this new space we will be taking the opportunity to exceed over one million stocked parts within the next year. We really do try every day to live up to our mantra of offering design engineers the widest availability of the newest parts so that their designs will have a competitive edge.”