SECTORS

Choosing an automatic warehouse for pallets means optimizing the logistics process.

Problems

The building considered for a transformation is the company’s most productive plant. It receives EPAL pallets with finished products -°©‐ 1,400mm of height and 800 kg from production. The flow is one pallet per minute. The pallets are stored and ready for shipping without dividing the load units, enabling no need for a picking stage. In outbound, 1,200 pallets leave the warehouse daily through the two loading lines in 8 working hours.

This process could not be continuous because it depends on the loading time of the trucks, which is approximately 30 minutes. Due to its high level of activity, the company placed two operators within the warehouse, one for the inbound flow of goods and one for the shipping process. In peak times of loading, due to several loading trucks arriving at the same time, two additional operators were put on site with trolleys to facilitate operations.

Solution

To solve the critical issues reported by the company, Automha has created an automatic warehouse for pallets with Autosat satellite that represented a winning solution.

It is a system based on a remote-controlled, semi-automatic satellite. Introduced in the line similarly to a drivePin system using a forklift, the AUTOSAT satellite allows us to allocate and withdraw the palletized goods using both LIFO and FIFO logic, according to the settings inputted into the handling parameters.

In detail, the drivePinP SAT solution included 7,500 pallet locations, 115 channels for 115 referrals, and 5 vertical storage levels. According to the study of flows and productivity of each satellite carriage in 30 individual satellite cycles, we decided to install 5 AUTOSATs to serve the warehouse, operating within the drivePin channels both on the shipping side and warehouse loading side.

Regarding the allocation of goods in the warehouse, the material is identified through a coding system and products with a higher rotation are inserted into the channels closer to the floor level to limit useless handling and increase the productivity of operations.

Advantages

This solution was structurally non-invasive. Due to the length of the warehouse and therefore of the aisles – from production to chipping is 65 m – Autosat enables the goods to be moved directly towards the operator, saving time and costs.