Traun, Austria
RWA Raiffeisen Ware Austria AG
RWA is a mainstay of the Austrian Raiffeisen goods organization. It was first established as a cooperative in 1993, taking over the functions of its predecessor organizations at the provincial and national levels. In 1998, the entire business was transferred to the newly founded RWA Raiffeisen Ware Austria AG. It brings together the Austrian Lagerhaus cooperatives, on a voluntary basis, into a strong group. RWA offers the Lagerhaus cooperatives a comprehensive range of services in the areas of agriculture, technology, building materials, home and garden, energy, and services. RWA's activities focus on the member cooperatives in Lower and Upper Austria, Styria, and Burgenland. The company employs just over 3,000 employees across four sites.
At the site in Traun, over 17,000 items from the agricultural and horticultural sectors are stored on a total area of 70,000 m² and shipped to the various dealers – that is to over 900 destinations in Austria, Italy, and Germany. All customers are supplied at least weekly, major customers even twice a week. In order to be able to achieve such handling capacities, the warehouse processes must be continuously optimized. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there are extremely high seasonal fluctuations in the industry: at peak times, RWA needs significantly more employees in the warehouse. This makes planning even more difficult.
Due to the ever-increasing demands on the warehouse, as well as on the employees, the workload grows from year to year. Due to the strong seasonal fluctuations, the warehouse had to be reorganized before each new season in order to enable optimized order picking. In addition, the employees had to put together the orders in the manual warehouse themselves. This not only takes a lot of energy, but also valuable time. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to compensate for the fluctuating workloads as well as the lack of skilled employees. Another major challenge is certainly the lack of space: small goods in particular block important storage locations in the warehouse that are required for larger goods.
A fully automated small-parts warehouse (AKL) from LTW. Automatic operation not only makes the work less complex, but also faster. This is because the goods come direct to the employee and the pallet warehouse and the AKL can be operated in parallel. It is a great relief for the pallet warehouse as it offers additional space for up to 17,000 small parts. And the best thing about the AKL? For incoming goods, the employee is shown where the item is to be stored to ensure optimized order picking. In addition, our customer invested in more efficient software. After 20 years of successful use, our software has been updated to the latest standards. This is not only an advantage from a technical point of view, but also when it comes to usability and intuitive operation with our new benchmark LTW LIOS Cockpit.
Warehouse optimization
