SCM has launched Autostore, a new automatic warehouse for spare parts operational since January 2022, established in the province Fonderia, Italy, as part of renovation and upgrading work at the industrial plant in Rimini, Italy.
According to SCM, the warehouse can handle 30,000 items in a structure covering 900m2 for a height of 5.5m, over 13 storage levels and with 24,000 modular boxes capable of holding up to 30kg of pieces each.
The new system allows gains to be made in terms of space occupied especially when compared to a traditional warehouse for larger sized spare parts, containing 4,000 in an area that is more or less the same size.
With Autostore, SCM can provide a more efficient, better-quality service by speeding up by 75% the pick-up operations and reducing dispatch times by 30%. Every day, around 300 shipments are handled containing thousands of components with a maximum lead time of 48 hours from the time the order is placed.
This is possible with 19 robots powered by two 12-volt rechargeable batteries capable of picking up one piece every 45 seconds, 24/7. The Autostore is also energy efficient, with an energy consumption lower than 0.1kW/h per robot, enabling long duration.
“We wanted to take another step forward by choosing the best that logistics management has to offer, a technology that, to date, had not yet been applied to the management of spare parts in the sector for wood technologies,” said Luca Maggiani, service and parts business development manager at SCM.
“Autostore is a system offering typical e-commerce performance, that not only brings spare parts to the operator, but works with top-quality performance and speed. From here, the partnership with Swisslog to devise a solution that fully satisfied our needs.”
Even with Autostore using 19 robots for operations, the number of resources employed in the service and parts team has remained unaltered.
The process
Suppliers deliver to the reception area where each piece is scanned, recorded, weighed and measured, so that the operator can choose the most suitable box in which to place it.
At that point, the Autostore will indicate in which box the piece needs to be placed using a ray of light. After additional checks, the box is loaded into the warehouse.
The robots only deal with loading and returning the boxes to the operator, but work continuously to optimise the organisation of spaces, arranging the various boxes in the best positions according to the frequency of use of the parts contained therein, determined by precise algorithms.
The Autostore can also reportedly store up to 200 orders in a continually updated and stocked database. This makes it simpler to handle all the data surrounding the activity, track each individual element delivered and perform advanced analysis that can be useful for the future, even in terms of prognostic maintenance.
