Cardinal & MultiPick: The WMS Behind NZ's First Automated 3PL Warehouse
A 115,000-pallet facility, goods-to-person picking, and a 400% lift in order-processing speed and accuracy — orchestrated on MultiPick®.
A Food & Grocery 3PL — set out to bring proven global automation home. The result is 'Perfect Pallet': a major pallet facility, with goods-to-person picking and 400% lift in order-processing speed and accuracy.
New Zealand now has its first fully automated third-party logistics warehouse. Cardinal Logistics' 'Perfect Pallet' project at Drury in South Auckland is a 115,000-pallet facility with state-of-the-art goods-to-person picking, materials handling by Daifuku Oceania, and Interlogic's MultiPick® warehouse management system orchestrating the whole operation. The site delivers a 400% increase in order-processing speed and accuracy. But talk to Cardinal's chief executive, Brendon Furness, and the numbers are not the first thing he reaches for
A sector under pressure
Cardinal Logistics is a Kiwi-owned Food & Grocerythird-party logistics operator headquartered in Auckland, running MultiPick®across all of its sites. It is a business built on absorbing other people's volatility — handling intra-day volumes for 45 customers in a category where the margin for error is close to nil.
Three stretched years drove grocery costs up and service levels down right across the sector. For a 3PL in the middle of it, the pressure is relentless.
"There is such variety and volatility in the intra-day week — it's very hard to manage. You don't get a pat on the back for a good day, but you get slapped for a bad day." — Brendon Furness, CEO, Cardinal Logistics
Quiet Mondays, massive Tuesdays, supermarket expectations,and a day of bad traffic that can have real consequences. Add human error and the health-and-safety realities of a manual operation, and the case for change was clear.
Cardinal's answer was not to work the existing model harder.It was to bring proven global automation home — even though, as Furness puts it, they were "a long way at the bottom of the earth," and knew that meant doing it differently.
A courageous project
Automation at this scale is not common globally, and leading it from the bottom of the world meant Cardinal taking greater control of the IT, the systems and the engineering than a business of its size would normally carry.
That is why Interlogic was brought in at the design phase,rather than handed a finished building to write software for. Interlogic's people sat alongside the equipment engineers and Cardinal's own key staff, analysing the data and treating the build as their own.
"Interlogic are a deep and intimate partner — guys that are prepared to jump on the trucks, jump in the forklifts, and walk with us alongside the robots so they walk in our shoes."
The relationship works because of continuity on both sides —the same people, the same developers and analysts, across years rather than across a project. That is what makes the hard conversations possible.
"Having someone in our lives, pre-automation and post,who is prepared to challenge you, push you and say no — that mattered as much as the technology."
Results / Outcomes
The Staff. Automation takes the strain and the stress out of workers' lives, and makes their managers' jobs easier.
What's next
The biggest unexpected by-product of the project has been the ability to work more closely with the retailers at the far end of the chain— the customers of Cardinal's customers.
Cardinal now uses MultiPick® to build multi-supplier,aisle-ready pallets for individual retailer stores. That lets retailers cross-dock and bypass their own distribution centres entirely: less cost, less stock-holding, and a shelf-stacker starting the shift with an accurate pallet rather than a puzzle.
"We think this IP we've evolved with Interlogic is transportable anywhere around the world."
With New Zealand's infrastructure deficit front of mind,both partners are already looking at the next project — at scale, and new.
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