Application
This customer was a manufacturer who received a multi-year contract from a large national retailer to supply retail products for regional distribution centers. The manufacturer was required to build individual pallet orders on a per-store basis for thousands of locations. This required the company to dedicate an in-house order picking “store” to palletize the requests of individual retail locations. The company wanted a lift assist system that would allow 2 workers per shift to build 20 pallets (240 cases) per worker hour in a work cell measuring 100’ x 40’.
Challenges
This application posed several challenges for this customer.
• There was a high potential for Muscular Skeletal Disorders and fatigue due to the repeated bending and twisting involved in loading the cases onto the pallets.
• The cases were large and ranged in size from 50 up to 200 lbs, so the lifting system would need to be flexible enough to handle this range.
• The building was not designed to handle any load on its ceiling joists, so a ceiling mounted system wouldn’t work. However, the palletizing was done in an area with considerable lift truck traffic, so a freestanding system could not take up huge amounts of floor space.