Automated self-supporting warehouse at the Coim site in Offanengo

On September 13, Coim inaugurated a new automated self-supporting warehouse at its facility in Offanengo (near Cremona, Italy), following an investment of over 10 million euros. The purpose of the project, aimed in part at supporting the increase in Coim business, was to create a warehouse inside the factory but situated in a position that would allow intralogistic rationalisation and ensure maximum safety.

The new warehouse, intended for the storage of chemicals - both raw materials and finished products ready for delivery - is fully automated and the handling flows are guided by a bespoke WMS (Warehouse Management System), which tracks the turnover of the items managed for an optimized distribution of goods in the storage areas. The WMS system also guarantees the traceability of the items, whose advances along the production flow are individually identified by a barcode system of the unit loads.

“Considering the heterogeneity of the packaging used by Coim and the need to create a structure with a high reception capacity, one of the most important prerogatives in the evaluation of possible solutions, was flexibility” said Paolo D’Adda, Coim supply chain manager. He also explained that the decision to opt for a fully automated warehouse was made only after a careful dimensioning study, undertaken in order to guarantee high production performance of the site and ensure that it would be able to cope with the site’s considerable daily inbound and outbound flows. 

Since it is a warehouse inside a chemical plant, the feasibility study required numerous in-depth investigations and had to take specific measures into account, not least a dual anti-fire protection system. Because of this complexity and of the need to strictly comply with all regulatory safety and fire-fighting requirements, the project required the involvement of different skills and functions - Supply Chain, HSE, Engineering, ICT, Security and Production - who in collaboration with external designers and leading Italian companies in the field of automatic warehouses, defined and completed the work in the 2018-2021 period, taking into account the interaction between the warehouse, production, IT management of the same as well as the external environment.

Massimo Tonani, manager of the Coim plant in Offanengo, added “The project saw the involvement of more than forty tier-one suppliers, or over a hundred counting subcontractors. We can say that the best Italian companies and skills were involved in the project, together with Coim’s strategic functions.”

Thanks to its vertical layout, the new warehouse, taking up an area of about 3,000 square meters, has a capacity of over 10 thousand pallet positions, against the 800 positions of a traditional warehouse with the same surface. A goal achieved with 25 meters in height, 30 in width and 100 in length. In order to mitigate the warehouse’s impact on the surrounding landscape, Coim planted the area with over 1,000 tall trees.

“When evaluating the various possibilities, in terms of construction technologies, for the new warehouse, the environmental impact of the project was a key consideration. “If we had opted for a traditional warehouse, to obtain the same result in terms of capacity we would have had to build on a much larger surface of virgin soil,” Tonani explained.