Manufacturing News

Eliminating manual links

ONE of the keys in establishing a continuously automated handling system is to iron out the areas where manual handling is involved.

Don Erskine, Industrial Conveying Australia’s MD, believes that until recently, what has been holding back completely functional and integrated solutions is a piecemeal approach by managers and planners.

“Industry has always considered the lack of complete integration as a form of reality, hence the manual handling that links various mechanised systems has been always accepted as the norm,” said Erskine.

“This has been extremely common in those businesses running very complicated lines of stock keeping units (SKUs). The greater the variation in SKUs, the more of a potential bottleneck there is at each point where manual handling is exercised.”

“Clearly, there was a desperate need right across the materials handling spectrum for an approached that involves unified thinking and a modern form of planning to completely eliminate manual handling from the equation.”

ICA’s project design team spent time researching the materials handling market and saw the need for a flexible automated SKU order collating and palletising system.

In particular, it recognised that this system needed to be directly linked to production or utilised in distribution warehouses for order assembly and dispatch of products. ICA targeted those businesses that palletise in layers, do rainbow pallets, or column or random stack.

Its research identified a requirement for individually tailored solutions for any company with limited, or hundreds, of SKUs and one that is applicable across the industry spectrum including third party warehousing, food manufacturing industry, retail distribution, pharmaceuticals, packaged meat and poultry supply — virtually any packaged goods requiring distribution.

This solution integrates any combination of ICA technology including robots, gantries, layer picking, layer transfer and disassembly, cassette loading, sorting and palletising. Sub systems normally include case and pallet conveyor system, bar code and/or RFID scanning and ASRS warehouse in some instances.

Enormous benefits may be achieved where the order assembly system is directly linked to production. The product is only handled once, eliminating the requirement of bulk palletising of products after production, and in some instances totally eliminating the need to store in warehouses.

Essentially, the ICA solution suits applications where there is handling of any number of SKUs from which orders are assembled. The system will speed up production facilities or warehouses that survive on multiple stock picking, shaving time off distribution of multi-orders.

For example, a business may have 400 SKUs from which it has to make up to 500 palletised orders on a given day.

In many warehouses, much of this is probably being done manually or with very basic material handling techniques. But every business is different.

It will depend on volumes, customer demand, number of SKUs, order collation and dispatch profiles plus other variables.

Therefore ICA has developed a system by which certain technologies can be mixed and matched to provide the optimum cost effective solution.

Industrial Conveying Australia icaust@icaust.com.au

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