Just 3 days to install idPAC to improve sorting operation

Shingakusha Co. Ltd. is a publisher specialising in educational materials for children. The company has more than 3,000 references and 1,300 national distributors to serve schools, homes and private education.
Kusatsu Logistics is one of its logistics centres which is a real bottom line for the operation in Shingakusha.

SOLUTION WITH IDPAC : ‘LIGHT, THIN, SHORT AND SMALL’

The improvement plan had reached a standstill, but it suddenly gained momentum when the manager in Kusatsu logistics dep. Mr. Matsui visited “Logis-Tech Tokyo 2016” to collect information and he was impressed by the compactness of idPAC, which was also a unique and completely opposite solution “Light, Thin, Short and Small”.
With idPAC, an optimal assembly line layout can be built freely and easily, he found that this solution would satisfy their condition of having a limited footprint.

Chivas Brothers’ success in its drive to become the global leader in Scotch’s fast-growing premium sector required a significant increase in production from the company’s Palletisation and Automatic Despatch facility in
Dumbarton on the outskirts of Glasgow. The facility plays a key role in the distribution of brands such as Ballantine’s, Beefeater Gin and Chivas Regal 25 Year Old. A recently completed project to upgrade the palletising and conveyor systems included a significant quantity of motorised rollers and Zero Pressure Accumulation controls from Itoh Denki. The system is designed to ensure maximum production from the site and provide Chivas Brothers with an estimated 50% increase in output.

OUR SOLUTION

The new conveyors transport different sized cartons containing a variety of bottle sizes, from eight existing production lines in the Clyde bottling hall to a completely new palletising system. Cases leave the bottling hall on eight separate conveyor lines at speeds of up to 60 cases per minute. All eight lines then travel underground for approximately 100m and around several bends before returning above ground to the feed eight new palletisers.

Euro-Negoce, is a leading independent wholesaler of electrical engineering products who distribute products to customers throughout Europe. Thanks to its large network of suppliers, huge stock capacity and purchasing power, Euro-negoce is able to provide its customers with the best price and immediate availability of thousands of products. Central to this service provision is their powerful in-house product inventory management system. These data processing systems manage multi-tarif purchases, daily imports, inventory control, order picking, shipment tracking and invoicing.

So when Euro-negoce constructed a dedicated new distribution warehouse in Epagny near Annecy in France, they required a modular and flexible automated material handling solution which could be integrated with their ERP and WMS systems in order to showcas

OUR SOLUTION

The conveyor solution is driven by runon-demand Power Moller® 24v DC Motorised Drive Rollers (MDR) from Itoh Denki. These drive rollers are incorporated within drive zones which are controlled by Itoh Denki’s HB510 circuit board with unique Zero Pressure Accumulation logic. This technology allows the conveyor to transport cartons and totes, zone-by-zone between the storage areas, order picking and despatch locations. The HB510 is configurable to allow adjustment of roller speed, transfer configuration and error monitoring. The zones automatically start and stop according to the demand for product and allows fast picking and sorting of orders as they are retrieved from stock.

e their logistics expertise.

Royal Mail’s state-of-the-art international mail centre near Heathrow, London is one of the most technically advanced mail handling centres in the world. Costing £367million and occupying an area the size of six football pitches, the Heathrow Worldwide Distribution Centre sorts and distributes every letter or parcel that leaves and enters Britain.

The centre replaces eight foreign mail sorting offices that previously served Britain and is designed to handle up to 10 million mail items per day and operates 24hrs a day. This single distribution centre is designed around a highly automated operation that includes 12 kilometres of conveyor which incorporate Itoh Denki’s energy efficient Power Moller® motorised drive rollers.

Itoh Denki’s modular and compact drive solution not only reduces space requirements, they also reduce noise levels and energy consumption compared to traditional external drive solutions. The roller conveyor is made up of lots of drive zones that comprise of a single motorised roller and several slave rollers. In this way a drive zone is able to readily transfer the trays from one zone to the next. Because each zone is independently controlled the motors can be operated on a run-on-demand basis enabling substantial energy savings to be made compared with continuously running external drives with complex belt drives and pneumatic actuators or slipping clutches.

Calculations show that when comparing a similar section of conveyor driven by a continuously run external motor, Power Moller® drives can reduce energy consumption by up to 60%. The whole-life-costs of the installation are also affected by belt drives and clutches that often require replacement as little as two years after installation. With a typical life expectancy of around 20,000 hrs Itoh Denki motorised rollers are being selected by system integrators and end users as the preferred solution to unit conveying applications.

VOW Europe Ltd is one of the UK and Ireland’s leading wholesalers of business and office supplies. Following the centralisation of their Sales and Service Centre, VOW opened a high-tech distribution centre in Normanton, England.
Leading 4th party integrator Logistex was selected by VOW to supply the integrated storage and materials handling systems. These included an extensive range of conveyor equipment manufactured by leading OEM Conveyor Units.
The system is built around a sophisticated one-kilometer carton conveyor. Where product separation is critical the conveyors are powered by low-energy 24v motorised rollers from Itoh Denki. Totes and cartons are routed around a zoned system for picking, before being checked and scanned and finally routed through a sorter at up to 2,850 items per hour.

From an early stage Itoh Denki’s Technical Sales Engineers worked closely with Conveyor Units and Logistex to provide the best conveyor solutions and specifications to meet the system challenges. The installation has been designed to handle the diverse range of order size, volume and changes in demand. Totes can carry up to 25kg and cartons as slim as 50mm can be conveyed directly to dispatch to keep space and shipping costs to a minimum.

The HB510 incorporates control logic and zone-to-zone communications that facilitate valuable product buffering and separation throughout the conveyor system. The HB510 is also configurable to allow adjustment of roller speed, transfer configuration, and zone release modes. This made it ideally suited to the various control requirements of the project and was used extensively throughout.
The combination of HB510 and Power Moller® 24v motorised drives provided the ideal solution to the high speed sortation conveyor installed in the despatch area.