SECTORS

Problem

Bru Textiles, leading provider of furnishing fabrics and upholstery, today distributes ten million meters of fabric produced mainly in India, Bangladesh, and Africa.

The fabrics come from suppliers in rolls about 1.6 meters long and of varying diameters, according to the type of product. The incoming and outgoing rolls required high handling and considerable effort from the logistics department, which was still handling the cloth within baskets stored on conventional shelves, moved by a trilateral crane operated by an employee and monitored by a computer system.

Solution
The need for an automated warehouse that reduce time in the picking phase and the overall margins of error was a welcomed challenge for Automha. The proposed solution created a fully automated warehouse for the 12000-unit load capacity, handled by 13 stacker cranes throughout a surface of about 4800 sqm.
The goods, each labeled for traceability, enter the storage area through two telescopic strips that lead to the control stations. The rolls that fail the checks flow into a titling station, where they are sorted according to the type of problem found; others proceed toward the lower part of the warehouse, within the three input bays. Here, thanks to 7 conveyor belts, the rolls are unloaded from the shuttle and picked up by the stacker crane, which transports the rolls into storage. These are stored at multiple depths, of 7 levels, supported by cradles specially designed to avoid damaging the cloth. One of the biggest strengths of Automha’s system is the ability to always maintain full stock: when a roll is taken, the location is immediately filled by another roll entering stock. A lane will never have empty locations.

When the system determines a cloth roll must be withdrawn, the stacker crane travels to the indicated position and withdraws the roll; arriving at the head, it transfers the cloths to a three-level machine (one for each crane), capable of holding 21 rolls, from which the picking operation takes place with another stacker with telescopic forks. At the end of this process, the rolls placed in the shuttles are taken by a cartesian robot that sets up the load in a single batch for delivery or for cutting.

Once completed, the batch flows into a smaller but still automatic second warehouse, where operators carry out the final tasks of rolls management.

Advantages

Thanks to the solution proposed by Automha, Bru Textiles can today boast the world’s largest automatic warehouse for cloth rolls storage..