SECTORS

The Mitr Phol Group is the largest producer of sugar and bioenergy in Thailand and Asia. Founded as a small family-run company in the province of Ratchaburi, today it is the fourth-largest sugar producer in the world and the second largest in China, where it entered into a joint venture with East Asia Sugar.

Problem

The company’s continuous growth highlighted the limitations of its warehouse located in Khon Kaen, which was unable to cope with the workload.

Mitr Phol considered the automation of its warehouse as the ideal solution for making the warehouse and order fulfillment process more efficient. The supplier chosen by Mitr Phol would have to overcome two obstacles: first, the narrow dimensions of the area identified for the construction of a new warehouse, and second, the constant humidity and temperatures of around 45 / 55°C, poorly tolerated by energy-intensive systems.
Mitr Phol recognized Automha as the ideal partner for supporting it in this important investment.

Solution

Automha responded to Mitr Phol’s needs and constraints by proposing an automatic warehouse with Autosatmover, a new generation, fully automatic modular system that can position goods in multi-depth storage areas at high speeds and with maximum precision.

The warehouse constructed by Automha is 11.5 m high and guarantees a flow of 80 incoming pallets/hour and 120 outgoing pallets/hour, for a load capacity of 6,900 pallets with a maximum weight of each loading unit of 1,600 kg.

A feature that distinguishes this system served by Autosatmover is the size of the Supercap, an onboard satellite controlled by a mother shuttle, used for automatic pallet picking/depositing operations in the various storage channels. The Supercap was specially constructed in this case to hold the customer’s product, which has smaller dimensions than the standard size.

Advantages

The automatic warehouse with Autosatmover enables full optimization of the available space while considerably reducing the management times of incoming and outgoing goods without affecting volumes, instead increasing the warehouse capacity and achieving considerable energy savings.

This has been accomplished by using Supercap, the satellite vehicle, equipped with Supercapacitor technology , which overcomes problems typical of systems powered by accumulators; problems such as long charging times (in the case of satellites with integrated batteries) or the need for operators to change the accumulators (in the case of machines with removable power sources).

The warehouse designed by Automha has therefore guaranteed a reduction in the costs of spare parts and in power consumed without sacrificing production efficiency.