Amorepacific is one of the world’s leading cosmetics companies, offering a variety of brands for skincare, makeup and perfumes. Most of the corporation’s products are manufactured at the Beauty Park in Osan, South Korea. In May 2019, a sophisticated production facility was constructed in Osan that included a shuttle system that works with intelligent robots.
KNAPP’s largest project in South Korea
The storage system solution at Amorepacific is the largest project KNAPP has ever implemented in South Korea. The requirements for quality were increasing non-stop and the manual warehouse was at its limits, therefore, Amorepacific selected KNAPP as collaborator to install a highly-automated production buffer at the Beauty Park in Osan. The new system provides over 80,000 storage locations, making it the largest OSR Shuttle™ system that has ever been implemented in South Korea.
After an extensive evaluation process, in KNAPP, we found the right partner to automate our warehouse. KNAPP is the world market leader in shuttle technologies and they offered us the best solution to fulfill all our requirements, which was also easily integrated into our existing system.
Two world market leaders enter innovative collaboration
With the installation of the highly automated production buffer for Amorepacific, KNAPP now has another internationally leading cosmetics company as satisfied customer.
Prior to the KNAPP solution, the processes were carried out manually. The smart solution by KNAPP not only provides higher storage density, but also optimizes the following processes:
- Handling pallets and containers
- Automatic depalletizing of incoming pallets
- Buffering raw materials for production
- Fully-automatic picking of the raw materials and producing a perfect sequence for palletizing
- Automatic palletizing of production containers and strapping of completed production pallets
- Transfer of sequenced raw materials to the production system
Our main challenge was to incorporate the KNAPP system into the existing production system used to produce the majority of their high-quality cosmetics. We needed to make sure that the production process was in no way impacted during that time.
The solution at a glance
Come join us on a tour through the warehouse of cosmetics company Amorepacific.
Fully-automatic depalletizing in the goods-in area
- Loose containers are placed on the telescoping conveyor system
- Pallets are transferred onto the pallet conveyor system
- Fully-automatic depalletizing carried out by intelligent robots
- Up to 600 containers per hour are depalletized

Increasing demands in the cosmetics industry require specific quality checks
- Containers are randomly selected for quality checks
- Items are checked in terms of color, damage and print quality
- After the quality checks, the items are stored in the central storage system
Quality has top priority in the cosmetics industry: Our quality checks ensure that only goods that are deemed acceptable are stored in the OSR Shuttle™. Moreover, each container has a unique serial number to avoid any confusion during lot tracking.
OSR Shuttle™ – the central storage system
- The OSR Shuttle™, an automated storage system, is the very heart of the system
- The system provides efficient storage and picking
- 60 % more storage volume than the previous use of manual racks
- Intelligent software allocates all the items to their corresponding storage location in the rack line system
- End-to-end lot tracking and following the FIFO principle thanks to unique serial numbers on the containers
- The fully-automated palletizing robots handle the containers once they are retrieved from the OSR Shuttle™

As the central element of the intralogistics system, the OSR ShuttleTM offers even more advantages:
- The shuttles can be easily and quickly replaced during maintenance and servicing, therefore, system reliability is very high
- Thanks to the low current consumption of the OSR Shuttle™ and the energy recuperation from the brakes, the system produces 20 times less CO2 emissions than conventional stacker cranes.
- The flexible system architecture offers the company capacity for future growth.
With over 80,000 storage locations, the OSR Shuttle™ storage system is the largest project we have ever implemented in South Korea. We worked directly with Korean suppliers because we also wanted to include local suppliers in the project.
Perfect pallet stacks thanks to intelligent robots
- Efficient production using palletizing robots
- Automated palletizing takes the strain off employees
- Robots can place up to 6 stacks with up to 6 containers on one pallet

What’s more, an automatic strapping machine comes into play for pallets that exceed a defined maximum height. Strapping these pallets prevents the container stacks from toppling over. Within a few minutes, a rail vehicle conveys the pallets to the corresponding production line.
Want to see more? Get a glimpse of the Amorepacific warehouse in the video below:
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