In order to meet the demand for its pharmaceutical products, the Greiner Bio-One management decided to build a new high bay warehouse near Stuttgart. The design brief was clear: high availability, good throughput, cost efficiency. DAMBACH SRMs and materials handling systems provide the optimum answer to such requirements. Greiner Bio-One specializes in the development, production, and marketing of plastic products for laboratories, and this project to upgrade its logistics to meet future demands was given the go-ahead in late 2017. Working together with Aberle GmbH as general contractor, DAMBACH provided the equipment for a highly modern, efficient warehouse, and completed the work at the end of April 2018.
There are more than 12,300 storage positions for pallets in the new high bay warehouse. The double deep storage bays are served by DAMBACH MONO storage and retrieval machines. These single mast SRMs reach travelling speeds of up to 120 m/min and a maximum acceleration of 0.4 m/s2 in the four aisles, each of which has 11 levels. With their raising/lowering speed of 60 m/min, these 28 m high MONO units are really powerful SRMs. The telescopic forks of their load handling attachments ensure fast single or double deep storage and retrieval. Those attachments were specially developed by DAMBACH to handle Euro-pallets and the special Greiner pallets measuring 1200 x 1000 mm. As both the SRMs and the load handling elements are supplied by DAMBACH, they are perfectly coordinated with each other and guarantee maximum reliability. With up to 25 double cycles per hour, optimum throughput rates are possible.
In addition, a compact DAMBACH materials handling system was provided for automated material flows. Installed on two levels and covering almost 1000 m2, the roller and chain conveyors, roller lift tables, turntables, and scissor lifts plus one vertical conveyor form the basis for efficient materials handling. The system can transport up to 100 pallets per hour at a speed of 0.3 m/s. Spur conveyors at ground floor level direct the pallets into the warehouse for storage. A central pallet conveyor line adds pallets from incoming goods and partial and order pallets from the order picking stations. With three lifts at floor level, order picking for more than 30 pallets every hour is possible.
Retrieval from the warehouse takes place on a second level. Fast, reliable transport of the pallets between the two levels is ensured by a DAMBACH vertical conveyor. It feeds the pallets into the central conveyor line, which takes the unit loads either directly to the dispatch spurs or order picking stations. All material flows from incoming goods to goods-to-person order picking to dispatch are handled by the same central conveyor line. The perfectly coordinated DAMBACH warehousing technology results in a self-contained logistics installation providing an efficient automated warehouse to ensure that Greiner Bio-One can cope easily with future requirements.
Source/Pictures: Greiner Bio-One, Aberle GmbH