Baking & Snack - August 2010 - 83

SHIPPING AND DISTRIBUTION | ADVERTORIAL

Fit to Ship
installs a paperless shipping
and distribution system that reduces labor, eliminates wasted
time and ensures all products are accounted for in the end.

When Pan-O-Gold Baking Co. searched
for new ways to improve and streamline
its operations as well as lower its overhead four years ago, the company targeted its shipping department. While production at its three Midwestern facilities
was highly automated, the bakeries relied on a functional, yet labor-intensive
paper system that had been developed
over the years to assemble products
at the automated packaging area, sort
them by route and depot and put them
on trailers for distribution.
In fact, at Pan-O-Gold's flagship plant
in St. Cloud, MN, three high-speed production lines today produce more than
600 SKUs of bread, bun and rolls that are
sold as premium brands, private label
products and to food service customers. Until about two years ago, production was automated all the way through
basket loading and stacking, but at that
point, the shipping staff often had to
sort through 6 to 8 pages of tracking
sheets to determine how much product
went on each route and in which trailers, said Bob Gartland, vice-president of
engineering and transportation for PanO-Gold. The shippers also wasted time
manually adjusting orders, waiting for
certain items to be produced and walking unnecessarily between the production lines and some of the distant trailers
docked at its huge warehouse.
At the 2007 International Baking Industry Exposition, Pan-O-Gold set out
find a solution to organize its shipping
department. In addition to streamlining

warehouse operations, the company
searched for a more precise and accountable order fulfillment process.
"We wanted it to be efficient," Mr.
Gartland said. "We wanted to use the latest and fastest technology available, and
it has to be customized to fit our needs."
Pan-O-Gold selected the dispoTool
paperless dispatching system from ToolBox Software North America to integrate
production and shipping at its St. Cloud
bakery. "We found that ToolBox has a
very comprehensive standard package,
but it is also willing to do modifications
that we desired or required," he added.
CUSTOMIZING A SOLUTION.
According to Mr. Gartland, ToolBox
personnel initially visited the St. Cloud
facility to determine how the shipping
department ran before developing software that integrated it into production.
Before tailoring the software to the
bakery's specifications, ToolBox collated
SKUs and worked with Pan-O-Gold to
ensure its accuracy and develop new
SKUs for those non-retail items that
didn't have SKU numbers. "ToolBox
was able to sequence the products on the
screens the way we bake them" instead of
just putting them in standard numerical
order, Mr. Gartland said. In addition to
strategically placing multi-color LED displays and touch-screen PLCs throughout
the shipping department, Pan-O-Gold
upgraded to a wireless option.
"With wireless, we're using the same
handhelds that we have been using on

our routes for years," Mr. Gartland said.
"They're rugged and fairly heavy, but
they have the ability to scan the product's UPC code. The shipper never has
to go to a terminal to enter data. We have
a minimal amount of wasted steps."
Specifically, shippers start at the end
of the packaging area, where they use
the handhelds to scan the UPC code on
a stack of baskets, and the system assigns
it to a so-called "buffer" area. If food service items don't have tags, they can be
selected from a pop-down list on the
handheld, which transmits the information to the printer at the end of each line.
The tag is then attached and scanned before the stack is wheeled to the appropriate buffer area, which is responsible for
supplying a designated number of shipping doors. As Pan-O-Gold gets ready to
ship products, each route is assigned to a
multi-color display. The displays, which
are in rails between the loading doors,
show the route number and have six
additional color sections. Each shipper
works on one specific color in his area.
At the buffer, a shipper scans the stack
tag, and the displays show each employee the quantities that are being staged for
each route. The product is loaded onto
trailers by route and transported to depots or directly to customers.
Prior to the transition, Pan-O-Gold
spent several weeks "selling" the dispoTool system to employees, relying on their
feedback to better integrate the system.
About 18 months ago, Pan-O-Gold started up the shipping system. It spent four

Baking & Snack - August 2010

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