Sapa cut changeover times with an AGV warehouse crane

In 1997 Sapa in Finspång installed the biggest press in Scandinavia for the pressing of aluminium profiles. One way of maximising the productivity of the press was to make handling of the pressing tools more efficient with a view to shortening the presses' changeover times. The solution was an AGV crane, which takes care of handling the pressing tools in, to and from the new warehouse.

Sapa, a company in the Gränges Group, manufactures aluminium profiles.
"When we installed the new press, we wanted to combine it with an economically good and technically efficient solution for handling pressing tools," says Harald Möller, local manager at Sapa.
"So we took a complete concept and built a new high storage warehouse for around 10,000 pressing tools."

AGV crane handles the tools
To handle the pressing tools, Moving/ProCode supplied an AGV crane - an automatic truck that copes with lifting heights between 450 and 5,700 mm.

"It is similar to a stacking crane," says Urban Larsson at ProCode, "but moves on wheels on the floor. It's an unusual solution that removes the problems an aisle truck can create. Of course, there are other matters that have to solved, mainly due to the truck moving directly on the floor and the tolerances being so small."

The system is controlled by ProCode's "Transport & Storage" concept, which was adapted to improve the truck's ability to position correctly for pallets. During a transition period there were problems with pallets that had been set down in the warehouse by conventional trucks. They did not have the positioning precision that was required to enable the new truck to find the pallets.

No manual handling
However, this did not prevent Harald Möller from being satisfied with the new tool handling system.

"There is no doubt that we needed to stack high," he says. "The alternative to Moving/ProCode's AGV solution was a manual truck. Our choice was considerably better in economic terms."

"The system is a direct replacement for a truck-served, manual pallet store," says Urban Larsson. "There are probably a lot of these around, and our solution quickly becomes profitable as long as the flow is fairly extensive."

The AGV crane now handles the pressing tools at Sapa, not only between the warehouse and the two workstations where assembly takes place, but also in the pallet store, which is 45 metres long and has three crane aisles and 1,850 pallet spaces. The distance to the workstations is ten and 80 metres respectively. The ordering of tools and tool settings is executed via dialogues in an intranet environment using the Internet Explorer program.

"We have got the benefits we hoped for," says a satisfied Harald Möller. "The AGV crane was a part of the necessary rebuilding of the whole factory. It was not an option to continue in the old manual way."