Overview
Who doesn’t like the smell of fresh bread and baked goods in the morning? Sitting down at breakfast to soft and warm pastry or crispy toast with melted butter is always a pleasant experience. To ensure the freshness and high quality of their delights from production to the grocery shelf, a leading bakery in Germany, Lieken Brot- und Backwaren GmbH, maintains high production standards to ensure quality.
Lieken Brot- und Backwaren supplies food retailers in Germany with fresh bread and baked goods under the name brands “Golden Toast” and “Lieken Urkorn.” This baker stresses the importance of high quality raw materials and freshness as essential. The company’s 4,700 employees are committed to always maintaining these characteristics and providing excellent service to customers.
The Challenge
Fast delivery is the key to maintaining product freshness for Lieken Brot- und Backwaren. To do so, the company must transport its products all over Germany in the span of a few hours from the moment the orders are placed. Therefore, the company started looking for a mobile computer solution to enhance the delivery process. “In a time pressured, intensive food environment, we must fully exploit all possibilities to help ensure quick delivery,” stated Dietmar Reiners, IT project manager of Lieken Brot- und Backwaren. Mobile data collection, along with an exact timetable, can help increase productivity levels, create simpler and more efficient processes and minimize delivery times.
The Solution
Lieken Brot- und Backwaren started testing products from various manufacturers. After consulting Datalogic partner, Bütema AG, a leading provider of mobile IT solutions, the company chose the Skorpio™ X3 mobile computer. This rugged and ergonomic device equipped with a large high visibility color graphic display, ‘Green Spot’ technology for good read confirmation and long-lasting batteries made it the perfect fit for the company’s needs.
The Skorpio X3 mobile computer is primarily used for order picking. After bread and bakery products made of whole grain, rye, multigrain or wheat are produced, they are packaged and delivered to various distribution centers on bar coded pallets. The products are shipped from the distribution centers directly to large customers or redirected to depots. From there, orders for the fifteen thousand retailers that sell their products are picked.
At both locations, warehouse workers scan the bar code on the pallet with a Skorpio X3 mobile computer, assign the checked delivery to a customer’s order or add it to the stock. This eliminates unnecessary temporary storage and speeds up processes. Lieken Brot- und Backwaren picks 6,000 pallets daily at the company’s several thousand square meter warehouses.
During this process, the Skorpio X3 mobile computer communicates information to the host system quickly and reliably. Lieken Brot- und Backwaren developed a system based on the Wi-Fi® infrastructure of the mobile computer to enable real-time communication with the server through a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Even short-term orders can be called up immediately and picked using real-time communication.
The company’s large warehouses are bustling with activity and noise. Palletizing robots, twenty to thirty lifting carriages, and other operations create a noisy enviornment where the beep from a traditional bar code scanner will not be heard. The Skorpio X3 mobile computer has Datalogic’s patented ‘Green Spot’ technology that projects a green spot directly on the bar code confirming it has been read correctly. This visual confirmation ensures a secure and fast scanning process.
The Results
Over 250 Skorpio X3 mobile computers support the delivery process in Lieken Brot- und Backwaren’s various distribution centers with very fast response times. According to the company, the ergonomic design of the Skorpio X3 mobile computer minimizes symptoms of operator fatigue like no other device on the market. Other advantages include its 3.2 inch color display, that makes input easier and the presentation of information clear, even in low light conditions. “The Skorpio X3 mobile computer is extremely robust, handy and provides long-life batteries that last up to thirteen hours” explains Reiners. “This allows us to use the device without recharging over multiple shifts. The Skorpio X3 mobile computer is so technologically advanced that mobility takes on a whole different meaning.”
Customer: Lieken Brot- und Backwaren GmbH
Industry: Manufacturing/Retail
Application: Order picking
Country: Germany
Datalogic Product: Skorpio X3 mobile computer
Datalogic Partner: Bütema AG
