Field Trip!!

For one of my classes today we took a field trip (I think the first one since high school) to the LDS Church Distribution Center. It's where the church ships out EVERYTHING (books, manuals, paintings, photos, clothes, mosquito repellent, keyboards, microfilm, building materials, food storage, furniture, and more) . It was pretty cool. They ship out over a million and a half magazines every month. They have a shelving and rack system that automatically places pallets on the rack and you just tell the system what you want and it goes and gets it for you and will put the rest back where it's supposed to go. All automated using bar codes. They also have a conveyor belt system that uses bar codes to move product and boxes throughout the whole warehouse (which is large) and automatically tapes the boxes up and then prints out and places a shipping label on the box and then moves it to the region where the box is being shipped--all automatically. It's pretty cool--or maybe it's just cool for us supply chain, logistics, and operations students!!! Anyways, I enjoyed it much more than sitting through a lecture--and I got out of my next class for the day because of it.