C&H Sugar
System Summary
C&H Sugar produces cane sugar and molasses for the U.S. market. The Crockett, CA refinery processes over 700,000 tons of pure cane sugar annually—more than 70 types, grades and package sizes, including packaged consumer sugars as well as packaged, liquid, and bulk granulated, industrial-use cane sugars.
Business Challenge
- ASAP had to upgrade C&H Sugar's 16-year old AS/RS, Warehouse Control Software and Controls System Software without slowing down production.
- Existing system relied on an obsolete and unsupported software package and VAX hardware for their 24x7 operations.
- ASAP had to include a real time interface to C&H Sugar's SAP instance.
Key Technologies
- Exacta Warehouse Management Software to maintain inventory control across 6 aisles of Litton AS/RS housing 15,400 locations
- Exacta Connect—real time interface to SAP
- Exacta AS/RS windows based graphical user interface
- Warehouse Control Software, and ControlLogix platform v.13.0
- Exacta transfer station, buy in station, and mix pallet build and inspection station.
- Exacta "3A In", "Conventional In", and "Manual In" stations to handle rebuilds and out of tolerance pallet builds.
- Exacta loop and ship rejects to accommodate no-reads or mis-reads
- Mettler-Toledo on-the-fly pallet dimensioner and in motion check weigher
- ID Technologies on-the-fly pallet Print and Apply applicator
Results
ASAP's solution yielded a seamless transition with no down time to C&H Sugar's production or shipping. The Exacta Warehouse Management System and Exacta Warehouse Control System increased throughput by 27% with 115 trailers per day vs. 90 trailers per day in the previous system. Packaging efficiencies have increased 100%, and C&H Sugar no longer experiences backups, down time, and receive loop saturations.