PepsiCo Automated its First Warehouse in Poland with Mecalux
The first automated warehouse for PepsiCo was installed in Poland by the intralogistics group Mecalux. Since the 1970s, the multinational food and beverage corporation has worked along the Vistula River; in 1991, it established its first factory in Michrów.
This facility is part of the Środa Śląska industry and has 9,000 locations for finished goods. Thousands of pallets of potatoes are delivered daily by the factory, which is the multinational’s most sustainable in all of Europe.
The facilities, which cover an area the size of seven football pitches, “produce bags of potato chips and other snacks for the European market, primarily Germany,” says PepsiCo. Every year, Środa Śląska receives 60,000 tonnes of potatoes to manufacture Lay’s.
PepsiCo meets its high production levels with Mecalux’s automated warehouse. The facility receives goods through new electric monorail and conveyor systems for pallets, executing thousands of movements continuously every day. These solutions are helping to optimize PepsiCo’s supply chain overall; the multinational also recently relied on Mecalux to equip its plant in Veurne (Belgium), one of the largest in Europe.
Additionally, PepsiCo will implement Mecalux’s Easy WMS warehouse management system to control inventory status in real-time. This software will be integrated with PepsiCo’s ERP system to ensure that operations run smoothly, coordinating flows of goods from production until they are prepared for distribution to clients.
“The production process is fully integrated with the automated warehouse. This means each bag of potato crisps is automatically transferred from production to picking, palletizing, and loading onto the lorry,” Maciej Pietrusa, Warehouse Manager for PepsiCo Poland in Środa Śląska, concluded.
