RF system gives a lift to high-rise warehouses company

Materials handling turnkey company Industrial Conveying has developed a technology for high-rise warehouses to allow each crane to communicate with every stationary object on its racks.

Using radio frequency communications, in a high-rise warehouse environment it means that the tight communications link between the materials handling technology and the product provides a rapid movement by the crane to gather stock.

This new system means management - particularly those with varied stock keeping units (SKUs) - can take their businesses forward in various ways.

In the right environment an RF crane system is far more appropriate than a fleet of forklift trucks. Apart from being expensive to operate and tricky to maintain, forklifts do involve a lot of human input and in recent times have been identified by WorkSafe bodies as a leading cause of personnel injury in Australia.

With energy prices - particularly electricity - forecast for continuous price hikes across Australia in the coming years, this can easily put the squeeze on warehouse operators with large premises.

Regardless of industry, the price per square metre of floor space is also destined to increase accordingly, forcing some warehouse operators to look for downsized options.

So it is a near imperative for operators to reduce floor space and opt to take advantage of all that cubic space between the floor and ceiling.

Don Erskine, managing director of the company, says companies in this situation require accuracy of selection during the materials handling process but find it hard to reduce damage to product while maintaining multiple choice of picking (a ‘first-in first-out’ system or by selection).

“We saw this as the way operators would need to increase efficiency in space use, so we developed a high bay stacker system to achieve these aims,” he said.

The stacker is a sorting system managed by RF to efficiently put as little as a single product into store, but for distribution can choose multiple products and dispatch.

It combines with automatic truck loading systems to pre-assemble loads waiting for the next truck to arrive, which makes a difference to operating costs.

Loading becomes much quicker and with this system an operator can ‘cube’ the load to get optimum usage in the truck space. It provides the ability to be able to load B-double trucks automatically.

Using a system of aisle-specific stacker cranes filled with RF devices to place or retrieve pallets at almost any height, its optimum work environment is in handling consistent pallets and multiple loads.

ASRS (automated stacking retrieval system), in conjunction with High Bay Warehousing, eliminates the cost of running a forklift fleet for these applications and increases the occupational health and safety levels in warehouses by almost eliminating human interaction with this moving equipment.

Stacker crane technology can reach much higher than the tynes of forklifts and will operate across a wide temperature and environment band to facilitate all types of industries, conditions and atmospheric variations.

"Warehouses running on stacker cranes aren’t signalling the death knell for forklifts, but they do have a much better suitability in premises handling constant types of pallets and loads,” said Erskine.

"Stacker crane technology is configured to be cost effective regardless of how high or how low an altitude it is handling - the technology is scalable and cost efficient regardless.

“ASRS suits general transport logistics services, the food and beverage processing industry, snack foods warehousing, general industrial warehouses and retail warehousing operations.”

In high-rise warehouses, RF-guided ASRS stacker crane systems are said to be the most effective way to store pallets because they can achieve far more efficient aisle movement, lift and lower times, and placement and retrieval than the human-operated forklift.

Stacker units achieve their high efficiency and rates of accuracy through automated control systems that accurately and rapidly position them on their X and Y axes.

The technology can be used in conditions where heat and/or humidity are required in the warehousing environment all the way down the other end of the temperature scale where frozen products are being stored at -30°C.

The ASRS integrates with Industrial Conveying's suite of pallet dock loading and dispatch technologies that can be entirely automated or made to work in synchronicity with dock-loading forklifts.

“For users, ASRS gains excellent efficiency of space, order picking accuracy and speed, and a very high level of OHS around its use because it eliminates forklifts in the warehouse and related labour issues and potential driver error,” said Erskine.