Perfect for contract manufacturing

Wide range of services, enormous diversity of variants

The Weimar-based company now employs 40 people and has a production area of around 4,000 square meters. One major challenge is the wide range of variants: "We produce around 800 assemblies a month, most of them in batch size one," explains Jörg Schneider. "Depending on the order situation, up to 6,000 different sheet metal parts are in circulation." Efficient processes are therefore of central importance - especially as the entire production is timed just-in-time for delivery. "This means that every part has to be in the right place at exactly the right time," explains Schneider. But that's not all: "We mostly work on a project basis, and in around 20 to 30 percent of cases, customers postpone deadlines. This makes order picking even more difficult for us."

Manual cantilever support reached its limits

To store the raw materials, the company used to rely on a manually operated cantilever rack in which the goods were stored chaotically. A second manual warehouse was available for picking the prefabricated individual parts for component assembly. However, this system was no longer able to cope with the complexity and production throughput. So Schneider turned to Kasto. The company specializes in semi-automatic and fully automatic storage systems as well as automated handling equipment for metal long goods, sheet metal and blanks. "Kasto really took a lot of time for us and analyzed our current situation in detail," praises Schneider. Together, they finally decided on the Uniline longitudinal storage system.

Plenty of space in a small area

Kasto built the warehouse as a silo construction with roof and wall cladding directly adjacent to one of the existing production halls. With a system height of 14.5 meters, it offers up to 750 storage locations for long goods, flat and bulky goods with lengths of up to six meters and a maximum height of one meter on a compact footprint. Three types of system pallets with load capacities of up to 5,000 kg are used as load carriers. The longitudinal warehouse has three retrieval stations in the hall and two storage stations outside, which are approached via a stacker crane. Schneider stores up to 10,000 different items in the warehouse - from raw materials to complete assemblies.

The long goods are retrieved via a chain conveyor. Photo: Kasto

Operation is simple: each transfer station has a computer terminal that the user can use to enter storage and retrieval commands. The system pallets are transported to and from the storage locations fully automatically by stacker crane. This is extremely dynamic with a lifting speed of up to 24 meters per minute and a longitudinal travel speed of up to 60 meters per minute. At the transfer stations, cross carriages and chain conveyors bring the load carriers into the warehouse - and out again. The employees remove the material by hand or with a forklift. The retrieval stations are also equipped with storage racks. "We can use these to pick items from a pallet, for example, while another storage or retrieval process is running in parallel," explains Schneider.

Intelligent control for more space in the warehouse

The system is controlled via the Kastologic WMS. This coordinates all the movements of the stacker crane and the stations and also enables permanent inventory management. The system pallets are equipped with barcodes. Another advantage is the dynamic compartment height management: this allows load carriers with different support heights to be stored. The system records the height of the pallet and automatically searches for a suitable location in the warehouse. If the pallet thus occupies several storage compartments, these are blocked and are no longer available for other load carriers. "In this way, we can make optimum use of the available storage space without any collisions," says Schneider happily. Kasto also integrated the warehouse management system into its own production planning and control system (PPS). Kastologic takes orders for storage and retrieval or picking directly from the PPS. The Uniline warehouse system has now been in use since the end of 2013 - and with success: "We were able to significantly increase our capacities, make the routes in our production shorter and more efficient and noticeably increase stock transparency," says Schneider happily.

www.kasto.de