For more than 30 years, Quadrifoglio has been a reference company in the professional furniture sector. Through its brands, Quadrifoglio Group designs and manufactures furniture solutions that combine functionality, innovation and a distinctive Made in Italy aesthetic. The Group has a presence in more than 80 countries and operates an industrial site of approximately 35,000 square metres, serving 1,600 clients with over 18,000 product customisations.
Business expansion and a highly customised product offering demand the continuous optimisation of warehouse and production logistics. Without it, any company risks being overwhelmed by costs and failing to meet customer expectations, which call for quality products alongside fast and reliable delivery. Achieving this goal means staying constantly attuned to innovation: translating it into the ability to leverage data, adopt exponential technologies and apply automation to logistics and production activities.
Stesi and Quadrifoglio: starting with a new WMS
The collaboration between Stesi and Quadrifoglio was born out of the need to optimise warehouse and production logistics in the face of a growing business.
Logistics was meant to become a source of competitive differentiation, but at the time several fundamental pieces were missing. The company was using an ERP extension as its WMS, capable of handling various logistics flows but lacking the cornerstone of location management. Without visibility into where goods were stored, retrieval and picking activities were not optimised and warehouse space could not be fully utilised, resulting in rising costs and declining efficiency. A transformation journey had to begin.
From WMS to production
As a first step, Stesi replaced the existing WMS with the silwaSUITE. All WMS flows for Finished Goods were implemented: location management, goods acceptance, put-away, lowering operations, picking, groupage and dispatch. The company was able to realise the benefits of silwa on its internal logistics activities from the outset: greater speed, simplified processes, elimination of manual activities and the errors that come with them, maximum space utilisation and optimisation of all flows, including picking. During this last phase, a bindello label is also printed in context, carrying the customer, job order and item information. To further accelerate and refine the main flows, a 3D warehouse mapping and visualisation module was also activated, offering the ability to view the logistics environment through 3D viewers for an immersive experience.
silwa is not only a WMS but a full Supply Chain Execution suite. The platform also governs production flows, meaning the movement of goods between the various work cells, a function that is typically handled by a MES. In this project, silwa also manages raw material consumption on the production lines, as well as transfers between the three warehouses, one of which is geographically separate from the main site.
Customisation and innovation
Every implementation of the silwaSUITE requires customisation. We consider one of our key strengths to be our ownership of the software, from which our ability to shape it in line with requirements that are both highly specific and subject to change over time directly derives.
In the Quadrifoglio project, a specific packing flow (Groupage) was used, and a bespoke customisation was developed for silwa Mobile Android relating to operator idle detection, which is triggered when an operator has not performed any terminal operations for a predefined period of time. This makes it possible to quickly identify any difficulties or issues encountered, enabling timely intervention and avoiding process slowdowns.
Finally, an interface was built with a miniload automated warehouse, which further accelerates and automates picking activities, providing robust support for the demanding workloads to which logistics systems are subjected.
The productivity, efficiency and safety benefits achieved (the result of optimised missions and routes) demonstrate not only the quality of the silwa product, but also its capacity to evolve alongside the needs of the environments in which it operates, in every case adopting a flexible, modular and future-proof approach.
