SECTORS

Khatod Optoelectronic is the leading Italian company in the production of lenses for LED lamps in silicone or polycarbonate, born in the province of Milan and grew up all over the world.

Since its origins, Khatod has developed cutting-edge technologies, attentive to the needs of consumers and the need to respect costs, low fuel consumption and environmental awareness. Company’s strength is the ability to manage the entire production process internally, from the planning phase to the construction; this allows to perfectly control the quality of each step, ensuring customers a high level product.

In addition, a careful study of all the news and widespread needs on the market and the consequent continuous innovation by the internal R&D department.

Problem

The Milan-based company has undergone in the last decade, a significant increase in production, consequent to the high demand for lamps with low energy consumption and high quality products guaranteed by Khatod brand. But this has caused inconvenience to the existing warehouse for the storage of finished products, which saw double the number of daily added products.

The structure included a completely manual warehouse, managed with shelving divided on a mezzanine structure. This type of configuration forced to a rather slow administration (the operator had to walk between the different lanes and different lofts) and prone to frequent placement and storage errors.

Solution

To solve the problems with the old manual warehouse, Khatod decided to consult Automha, a leader in the automated storage industry, with which it shares the same attention to quality and the same desire to internally manage all phases of their design and production.
The solution proposed by Automha consists in a automatic warehouse with MINILOAD BOOSTER, an automatic system suitable for the storage of containers or trays, used for all requirements characterized by high levy flows.

For Khatod was realized a warehouse with a single stackercrane BOOSTER, which handles plastic boxes in double depth and occupying an area of 62 x 5 x 8 m.

The plant can accommodate up to 3500 boxes of the size of 60×80 cm and a variable height from 42 to 60 cm; the maximum weight for each SKU is 50 kg and can be operated either with a logic SINGLE-REFERENCE or MULTI-REFERENCE. This is possible thanks to AWM software, which allows to keep the traceability of each product entered in the SKU.

The system has a maximum potential of 80 individual cycles/ h or 50 combined cycles/h inclusive of reordering of the boxes according to FIFO logic.

In addition to the stacker crane BOOSTER, the warehouse created by Automha is composed by two HANDLING areas:

• A main magazine dedicated to picking and refilling operations composed of two operator workstations, including PC, control panel and bi-directional conveyor. It is in this area that are managed the goods leaving or entering the shipping department.
• A secondary header which communicates directly with the production department, consisting of two operator stations with PC, control panel and conveyor unidirectional. In this area they will only implement refilling operations.

Advantages

Thanks to this solution, Khatod has been able to greatly increase the storage capacity of its warehouse without having to increase the surface. Added to this is the extreme advantage of not having to think in the direction of operator-to-goods, but GOODS TO OPERATOR. This allows to decrease administration time and speed up the picking practices, reduce the margin of error and have a perfect knowledge of this goods in stock – thanks to Automha software.