One of our good customers is a very large, independent grocery warehousing operation. They came to us with the need for a way to smooth the throughput of incoming palletized grocery goods to the Automated Storage & Retrieval System (ASRS). Then they wanted to pull those goods as needed out of the ASRS and load them on trucksfor delivery to their customers.

The issues our customer asked Lauyans to resolve?

• Load consistency issues, such as pallet size & type, from various suppliers. Out of tolerance pallets must be ID’d at the beginning.
• Stretch-wrapped pallet loads can shift in the truck or on the forklift unloading the truck. Tilted or twisted loads catch in the storage and retrieval process. They want loads to be straight and square before they enter the ASRS.
• Incoming pallets can be broken. Pallets can have protruding nails, loose or broken boards. Our customer wants bad pallets to be ID’d and fixed at the very front of the system to avoid problems inside the ASRS.
• Loads can be too high or too wide for the ASRS. Loads that jam in the racks are not acceptable.

Lauyans’ engineers recognized that these issues had to be addressed
on the front end to insure that the loads can be safely stored and
retrieved. Any problem with a pallet or a load can cause binding,
hanging or collapse within the ASRS. Loads that go into the ASRS
without problems will come out without problems.

Here is what we did to insure that only stable, properly sized loads went
into the ASRS each time.

• The pallet under each load is automatically checked by Lauyans’ equipment for out of tolerance size, protruding or loose nails and missing or loose bottom boards. Loads with bad pallets are shunted to one side for correction and then sent to the ASRS.
• Lauyans’ Load Squaring Device automatically straightens loads that have shifted sideways in transit but had not broken loose of the stretch wrap. This prevents loads from jamming within the ASRS racks.
• The height and width of each pallet load is checked to insure that it does not exceed the maximum dimensions allowable in the ASRS.

Results? The customer’s expense and frustration with poorly structured loads is gone. And Lauyans has repeated this effort through several expansions our customer has had to meet rising demand.

Does your company face a situation that requires special material handling expertise? Contact us today!