Holeki bakery has a keen interest in responding to customers who experience that boxes of products are sometimes missing when pallets are delivered.  The Belgian company currently spends a lot of time and energy on finding out where boxes get ‘lost’ in the supply chain.

This project will explore smart visualisation tools for controlling and verifying pallets and how to capture, store and link control data to the purchase order.  The goal is to ensure all pallets are complete before dispatch and improve traceability so customer claims can be solved more efficiently – reducing verification time from three hours to 20 minutes.

Holeki is collaborating with industrial IT partner Savaco.

Final report summary
A deep analysis of the current order process from order reception to product palletisation, wrapping and transport pinpointed a number of problems, where boxes go missing primarily due to human error when stacking products onto pallets.  Based on this detailed description, it was possible to establish a step-by-step approach to tackling the problems. The goal was complete pallet verification to improve customer trust and avoid financial loss.

The smart visualisation technology in focus included a 3D camera, box quantity verification, a hand scanner and a PC with touchscreen. By scanning the unique pallet identification, pallet information can be gathered from the database and a command sent to the 3D camera to scan the pallet and ensure that the products packed match order requirements.

Due to the relatively high cost of the 3D camera technology and data processing tools, other options were also identified for investigation beyond the end of the project.