High-performance engineering steel is stored safely and picked more efficiently at Oldbury-based Bohler- Uddeholm (UK) since it invested £3 million in an automated KASTO UNICOMPACT warehouse and a further £1 million in other site improvements. The computercontrolled storage and retrieval system became operational in the first quarter of 2016, having been systematically populated with bar, tube and other long stock that was previously held in conventional cantilever racking.
The immediate and future benefits are far-reaching. The number of forklift trucks on site has been cut from 15 to 6, reducing overheads, making the working environment safer for personnel and cutting diesel emissions. In addition, warehouse operator costs have been lowered by 15 per cent, with personnel redeployed to other duties.
There has been an 80 per cent saving in floor area. The KASTO store has a 1,000 m2 footprint, whereas previously 5,500 m2 was required to stock 2,600 tonnes of material, although the new tower can easily hold double that amount.
The freed floor space will be used to increase the number of bandsaws, machining centres and grinders to allow Bohler-Uddeholm (UK) to carry out more added-value processing.
Managing director Tom Gowans commented, “The automated warehouse has already started to raise our competitiveness and will underpin our planned 50 per cent growth in throughput by 2020, increasing turnover from £50 million to £75 million.
“It will also benefit our customers, as we can now ensure same-day picking and despatch for all orders received before noon. In the past, during busy periods, we could not guarantee that. Average lead-time has consequently halved to one-and-a-half days.”
Bohler-Uddeholm is part of the Special Steel Division of voestalpine Stahl AG, which owns specialised mills in Austria, Germany, Sweden and Brazil producing cold and hot work steels, mould and tool steels, high speed steels and various alloys including nickel-based varieties.
The KASTO UNICOMPACT 3.5 at Oldbury is the sixth bespoke warehouse manufactured by KASTO in Germany for Bohler-Uddeholm group distribution centres worldwide. The 37-metre long store contains 2,377 travelling cassettes capable of holding steel bars and tubes up to eight metres long to a maximum weight per location of 3.5 tonnes. Useable width of the cassettes is 620 mm and there are three height variants – 180 mm, 220 mm and 450 mm.
The automated storage and retrieval facility is 15 metres high and has been built onto the end of the original warehouse at Oldbury, which is nine metres high. Exterior parts of the extension have weatherproof cladding, including a 26 metre long end wall and the four sides of the tower that are above the nine-metre roof line.
An integrated, overhead gantry crane feeds 12 cassette buffer stations, where operators put material away into store and pick orders. Some material is transferred to 17 automatic bandsaws and on to other machine tools, all of which are now close to the store. Previously, material on racking had to be found by the picker and moved through two bays by lift truck for processing. It entailed significant operational cost disadvantages, health & safety risks associated with manual material movement and potential delays in supplying customers.
The storage system delivers and returns up to 45 cassettes per hour containing a mix of 4,500 line items of engineering steel between eight and two metres long. (Shorter sections are held in two 9.5-metre Lean Lift towers nearby.)
The picking crane has a double cycle capability, picking a new order and returning the previous cassette to the free location, ensuring fast and dynamic delivery. The warehouse is particularly energy efficient, as it does not need lighting or heating, added to which energy recovery and power storage on the downward travel of the picking crane is a standard feature of KASTO warehouse designs.
The KASTOlogic warehouse control system with ID and password access has been interfaced with the stockholder’s SAP administration and inventory system, which includes Idox information management software. It has created a largely paperless working environment, with inventory management and 100 per cent material traceability provided from material purchase to sale. Data input to the system is via barcodes or numeric product coding, or by length and / or weight of material.
Tel: 01908 571590
Email: sales@uk.kasto.com
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