About two years ago, DigiKey, a distributor of electronic, automation and control components, unveiled the company’s new 1 million square foot facility in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. The warehouse has 2.2 million usable square feet, making it one of the largest warehouses in North America. The warehouse is so big you could lay down the Empire State Building inside of it, and it’s so technologically advanced that some employees say it’s like working on the Death Star–logistically, not ideologically.
Two weeks ago, IEN traveled to northern Minnesota, about an hour from the Canadian border, to tour DigiKey’s new facility, which stands as a true feat of automation engineering.
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DigiKey does a lot of business. The company had some $5 billion in sales in 2022, so it moves a lot of product. For example, it processes 200 pallets per day, shipping some 25,000 orders daily. Previously, orders were filled by warehouse pickers and it wasn’t uncommon for an employee to put in 20,000 steps per day. Well, now the products come to employees via an intricate order retrieval system that holds about 1.6 million SKUs and sends components to order assembly stations via 25 miles of conveyors.
DigiKey partnered with Knapp, selecting the integrator’s OSR Shuttle Evo Technology. The highly automated shuttle system in Minnesota is the largest of its kind ever built by Knapp. The company says the system has more than 1,000 automated shuttles that support order fulfillment. While DigiKey currently has 1.6 million SKUs, Knapp’s system has a design capacity for 2.7 million, positioning the distributor for future growth.
Such sophisticated automation must be constantly monitored. Knapp even has a command center in the heart of the warehouse to make sure everything runs smoothly, chasing down errors, jams and any other maintenance issues in real time.
Even garbage collection is automated; an Omron Trash Bot AGV roves from station to station so employees can unload waste.
Founded in 1972, DigiKey was a pioneer in the mail-order catalog business. The company started with just two employees working out of a 200-square-foot building they shared with another company. In the first year, the company shipped about 10% of the packages the company now ships per day.
DigiKey has 5,000 employees globally, and there are about 3,600 in Thief River Falls. The company processes 6.5 million orders annually to nearly 1 million customers in 180 countries. While the company is known as a resource for design engineers, with 450 automation and control suppliers, it has emerged as a player in the industrial market, and automation and control is the company’s fastest-growing industry segment.
While the ribbon-cutting was two years ago, the facility still had that new building smell and remains incredibly clean, but I suppose that makes sense; if you have 25 miles of conveyors running, you want to keep dirt and grime from clogging things up.
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