Getrag Transmissions, one of the world’s leading suppliers of transmissions for Ford vehicles, needed to find a way to organize its warehouse in Liverpool, England, to accommodate incoming parts that were arriving in pallets of different size, materials and weights.
It turned to Interroll, a company that specializes in palletizing systems for warehouses and industrial applications.
The new system consists of 228 pallet positions in a rack structure that is four pallets deep, three tiers high and 19 lanes in length. Supporting first-in, first-out storage protocols, the system handles many different types of pallets of various shapes and sizes from Europe, North America and Asia.
Neil Hodgkinson, Getrag’s contract manufacturing engineer, said the new system simplifies logistics at the facility.
“The new pallet flow system has been located closer to our production area and has provided compact, space-saving cubic storage, enabling identical products to be grouped in the same lane and bays,” Hodgkinson said. “This, in turn, simplifies location and order picking of parts to support production of some 1,600 to 2,000 gearboxes daily.”
Each land has rollers that are 60 millimeters wide and have a 78 millimeter pitch, as well as a safety mechanism that helps protect operators. When a driver removes a pallet from the order picking face, there is a time delay before the device releases the next pallet in line.