Technological progress and industrial automation are revolutionising the way companies manage their warehouses and internal logistics. Self-driving vehicles are being used to move goods from one point to another within the warehouse or production area. This is identified as a strategic choice in terms of safety and increased productivity, as well as data management and traceability.
Speed in the supply of goods, safety for operators and products, better supervision and management of the warehouse are just some of the advantages that companies can concretely verify following the installation of a system.
Since 1966 TecnoFerrari has placed industrial automation at the heart of its business, first in the ceramic industry and then by developing new solutions in various industrial sectors. During the last months of 2022, it completed work on its new headquarters, also in Fiorano Modenese, where it installed a system with three-way automatic vehicles for its warehouse.
Specifically, the system, complete with pallet in-out picking management, consists of a group of chain conveyors for inbound and outbound pallet handling, including a system for checking the shape, integrity and weight of each individual pallet. Downstream of the group of pallet inbound and outbound conveyors, a shuttle equipped with telescopic forks, picks up the pallets to make them available to the trilateral vehicles, which have the task of depositing the individual pallets on shelves over 10 metres high inside the warehouse and picking them up to make the outbound goods available.
The two VNA trucks present are equipped with mixed guidance (laser and magnetic) and, unlike the stacker cranes, have the ability to move freely between the aisles of shelves without the use of fixed guidance structures.
This feature makes the entire installation considerably more flexible than classic automated warehouses, as well as allowing the possible integration to a previous installation, or the realisation of post-commissioning modifications. In fact, the insertion of a third trilateral vehicle is planned shortly, which, thanks to the simplicity of the traffic management software completely realised by Tecnoferrari, can be immediately operational from the very first moment.
The WMS is entirely realised in TecnoFerrari. The software is able to manage material entering and leaving the warehouse using A-B-C classification: the latter is essential to guarantee a constant supply flow by rationally distributing the goods in proportion to their value.
The architecture is fully automated to meet the needs of Industry 4.0, where production management, handling supervisor and automated vehicles are interconnected and interact via standard Ethernet/IP protocols.
The shuttle with forks and the trilateral trucks in the plant, like all Tecnoferrari machines, are equipped with the most reliable and sophisticated safety devices to guarantee the safety of operators working near the warehouse.
Finally, the system described above is also automatically connected to a picking area where the operator can find the goods ready to be picked according to the processing orders and automatically send any un-picked remainders back to the warehouse. A weight facilitator integrated in the line is used by the operator to handle products with high weights and dimensions.
The industrial automation was developed with the goal of improving production efficiency, reducing production time and increasing product quality, a goal that was already achieved after the first few months of system commissioning.