November 14, 2001—Manufacturing, distribution and warehousing operations, especially those requiring mixed pallet and split-layer order building, can benefit from the horizontal pallet carousel systems developed by Remstar International. These systems allow businesses to step up from manual operations to increase productivity, reduce order picking errors, and improve operator productivity and system throughput by as much as 300-400 percent.
Horizontal pallet carousels are units of horizontally rotating shelves that move automatically in response to operator commands. Each carousel has a range of 12 to 100 pallet positions and can accommodate up to 3,000 pounds per position, double-pallet high. They can store more items and more weight than conventional shelving while using up to 60 percent less floor space and 80 percent less cubic space.
In a typical system application, a wave of orders is downloaded to the picking workstation. A group of orders is processed by the system software for commonality and automatically assigned a position on the put horizontal carousel. The operator scans a pallet’s bar code and a bar code on the carousel’s base plate to marry a specific order to a pallet. Once the operator has picked all of the orders in a batch, the completed pallets on the put carousel rotate to the back of the unit and empty pallet positions rotate to the front to create the next batch of orders. Completed pallets are removed from the put pallet by a lift truck and routed to shipping or consolidation.
For more information, contact Remstar International at 800/639-5805.
