The furniture industry is becoming more demanding - panels in different sizes and materials need to be processed into profiles as quickly and cost-effectively as possible whilst being transported in individual packaging quantities. Suppliers who can react flexibly and guarantee excellent quality at the same time gain an enormous competitive advantage in an agile market environment. Our customer has been operating in this industry for many years and is familiar with the large amount of manual work involved in handling bulky and sensitive boards. Rising salary costs, a shortage of skilled workers and competitive pricing are also affecting success, which is why we were asked to modernize the production process.
Our solution is an individual automation concept consisting of a fully automated destacking cell for narrow components. Of course implemented as a customized special solution with a seamless connection to existing processes and machines:
After the panels have been sawn, the layers are flexibly sorted, labeled, provided with special layers, destacked and placed on pallets for shipping as required. Special features such as roller conveyors with a protective coating and a specially designed gripper system on the robot ensure gentle material handling. Integrated discharge stations ensure flexibility for manual intervention without disrupting the process. As a result, the automated stacking cell takes over the entire handling process and helps our customer to achieve a strong market position through speed, reliability and significantly lower labour costs.
The huge variety of different materials and dimensions of the components within this automation project is truly unique. Only with the help of cleverly designed interfaces, validation tests, light barriers and measuring systems the large number of special combinations can be handled. At the same time, both the fragile nature of the materials and the resulting high quality demands of the consumers require some additional considerations: Roller conveyors with a protective plastic coating and monitoring of the pressure forces acting on the traverse gripper system are just a few examples. The project‘s planning work in form of a simulation was also decisive for the course of the project: in order to achieve the performance targets, three different outfeed options with corresponding signal lights for onward transport were implemented. With this tailor-made special solution, the amount of time and effort was significantly minimized and our customer‘s employees can now focus on more complex tasks.
We will be happy to advise you on projects of this sort and answer any questions you may have about our references.