Customized measuring system APACHE from AKL-tec paves the way for Logistics4.0
Rüdinger Spedition GmbH, headquartered in Krautheim, Baden-Württemberg, specializes in the transport of XXL general cargo. The company was founded in 1930, has been family-owned since then and is continuously expanding. Today, the company employs 250 people, has 140 truck-trailer combinations and over 20,000 square meters of warehouse and transshipment space. These areas are divided into 6,000 square meters of crane storage and also 6,000 square meters of block storage, 22,000 pallet storage spaces at three warehouse locations in Baden-Württemberg and a total of 8,000 square meters of handling hall. Every day, countless trucks arrive at the 5,000-square-meter transshipment hall in Krautheim, where they have to be unloaded quickly or reloaded for further transport. In the spacious transshipment hall with a total of 35 gates, perfect organization combined with high data quality is the be-all and end-all. For this reason, the company uses the multidimensional APACHE measuring system from AKL-tec GmbH.
Data quality thanks to Logistics 4.0
In everyday freight forwarding, not only palletized goods, whose dimensions are usually known, are transported, but often bulky goods as well. Unfortunately, the information provided by the shipper on dimensions and weights does not always correspond to the facts, which often results in the selection of an unsuitable truck by the dispatcher and, in the worst case, can also lead to overloading of the vehicle. Since as many goods as possible are to be transported per truck and economical and environmentally friendly transport is therefore a high priority, those responsible at Rüdinger Spedition GmbH opted for the APACHE multidimensional measurement system. “I have seen the system in many transshipment halls and was immediately impressed. Digitization and data quality are just as important in logistics as they are in industry. That’s why we also talk about Logistik4.0. Thanks to APACHE, manual measuring, writing down, weighing and re-noting of data and thus annoying transmission errors are a thing of the past,” explains Roland Rüdinger, Managing Director of Rüdinger Spedition GmbH. In addition to avoiding sources of error, automatic measuring represents an enormous time advantage, since the delivered goods can be measured directly after arrival and then sorted according to destination and loaded.
XXL piece goods are no problem for APACHE
The APACHE measuring system stands for automatic pallet characteristic detection and records all decisive values with the highest precision, accurate to the millimeter and gram. “Among other things, we specialize in XXL unit loads. The transport of oversized freight is particularly demanding, as unpacked general cargo often has to be loaded as well. However, we could not rely on a standard system for the exact measurement. Since AKL-tec GmbH manufactures each system individually and tailor-made for the customer, we have found our ideal partner in this company”, the managing director praises the flexibility. For measurement, the freight, which is up to five meters long, a maximum of 2.5 meters wide and up to 2.8 meters high, is placed under the APACHEN on a scale embedded in the floor and then scanned three-dimensionally with two laser measuring heads. During the measurement, a photo of the object is automatically created and integrated into the shipment order. Within seconds, the process is complete and the weight and dimension data are stored in the system. The warehouse staff can then use the barcode to extract precise information about the dimension and the further transport route. “If we notice during the measurement that there are differences between our values and those of the registration, we record them in the data record and inform the sender about it. In this way, we always have exact values for billing, and from every freight,” says Rüdinger. Another advantage of the measurement system is its insensitivity to reflective foils, which do not negatively affect the measurement results in any way. “Process reliability is an important criterion for us, and delayed departures due to unforeseeable loading difficulties must be avoided at all costs. Since we started working with APACHE, we have not only been able to load our trucks optimally, but also to act more economically,” Rüdinger concludes positively.
