How Tubądzin Automated Picking for Tiles Weighing Dozens of Kilograms

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało talks with Jolanta Gałązka, Head of Logistics at Tubądzin, about managing logistics at large scale in the building materials industry. They discuss the challenges of warehousing and transporting heavy, fragile products, and preparing the organization for new sales channels, including e-commerce.

WEIGHT, NOT VOLUME, IS THE BOTTLENECK

In ceramic tile logistics, a truck's payload capacity runs out long before its volume does, and growing tile formats (up to 120x275 cm today) require carriers nearly three meters long, well beyond a standard euro pallet. Before goods are even dispatched to a customer, the company carefully verifies whether the recipient has the equipment to safely unload at terminals — because a heavy load handled badly will almost certainly arrive damaged, and that's a reputational cost bigger than a one-off transport loss.

FROM SCATTERED FACTORIES TO ONE LOGISTICS CENTER

Before a central logistics center existed, each factory fulfilled orders independently, exchanging assortment so a customer could get the full range of products — a huge transport burden in itself. Building a single center that gathered all production and distributed it to every channel was a turning point: the end of paperwork, the start of terminal handling, barcodes, and labels. That was the foundation on which picking automation was only later built.

WHY MANUAL PICKING STOPPED BEING ENOUGH

Increasingly fragmented orders (customers stopped holding their own stock, shifting picking onto the manufacturer) combined with physically heavy work — dozens of tons a day moved by hand per worker — meant traditional scaling (more people, more equipment, more space) stopped delivering proportional productivity gains. The solution was a fully automated buffer: 8,500 pallets in a zone served by eight pallet stacker cranes, with 12 picking stations, each fed by four pallets at once (48 orders picked in parallel) and supported by a gripper manipulator that moves over 200 kg in a single motion, taking the strain off a worker's spine.

DESIGNING FROM SCRATCH, NOT PATCHING AN EXISTING PROCESS

A key design decision: instead of bolting automation piecemeal onto existing processes, the entire process — including goods receipt — was redesigned from scratch. Goods coming off the ramp go straight to the picking zone if needed there, instead of first going into warehouse stock and only later being moved as a buffer replenishment — eliminating unnecessary, "empty" moves, something only possible by thinking about the whole process flow, not treating automation as an isolated tool.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT MATTERED MORE THAN THE MECHANICS

Building the physical installation was, in the head of logistics's view, the smallest challenge of the whole project — what mattered most turned out to be change management within the team and good design of the software controlling the automation. The team was engaged and told that automation wouldn't mean job cuts before the investment even started — and the result exceeded expectations: picking productivity rose so much that adjacent areas (like loading) had to be strengthened, with no layoffs. Today the company has practically no employee turnover and doesn't use temp agencies.

THE LINE BETWEEN B2B AND B2C IS BLURRING

Business customers increasingly expect delivery at a specific hour, not just on a given day — a standard e-commerce has cemented in B2C, but one still technically hard to meet with pallets weighing up to 300 kg or 1.5 tons (a courier won't leave a load like that "at the door"). The companies that solve this gap in heavy-freight service first will have a real market advantage.