yiling's reflection

Went to Army Logistics Base for the first time in my 18 years of life. At the beginning, the presentation about ALB was quite boring but enriching. The person told us about the different operations of ALB.

Then there was a tea break. Food was quite nice, the mini popiah was quite special, didn't eat this kind before, the filling is egg and crab meat instead of normal vegetable. For the banana balls or cake, someone saw a worm crawling in the tray.

After the food, went to the warehouse to tour. It was a through flow warehouse. The height of it is 30m which is 10-storey high! A lot of things are automated, because the staff there is lazy?

Anyway, there are a lot of different types of storage:

• Vertical carousel system
  It stores small and light load items on their rotating shelves, which in this case, medical supplies are stored. I think vertical is used because the height of the warehouse is high? it's part to picker, so can save the picker from moving around.

• Powered mobile racking (in main storage, maybe the throughput level is low)
  it's quite cool because it'll move but will stop when someone is in the way or something. It is expensive but they still use it to save space. One disadvantage is that only one person can take the item at a time, so the other person has to wait. But it's for low throughput anyway, so nevermind.

• ASRS
  Pallet ASRS is for big items, and bin ASRS is for small ones. Just press a button and it'll store and retrieve items itself. This will prevent the workers to climb up and down, thus, reducing risks of them falling down.

APR

VNA racking

Shelving

Cabinet

Block stacking

There are quite a number of material handling equipment. But I only remembered the forklift and the laser guided vehicle. The laser-guided system ensures that they avoid physical obstacles. The LGV is found in the marshalling area.

Forklift

Modern wireless radio frequency identity system is used in the warehouse to facilitate WMS, allowing all warehousing and distribution functions to be recorded in the system as and when they want.

Overall, it was quite a fun trip. It let me experience a real life dcm instead of the usual theory theory and theory.