Stiho is a wholesale company that trades in wood, panels and construction materials with over twenty branches in the Netherlands. To make fast and complete delivery possible, the company constantly has a large stock at both its distribution centres and walk-in points of sale.
Stiho
Uraniumweg 27
3542 AK Utrecht
The challenge
Like many companies, the logistics at this company is a major challenge. The warehouse is full of different construction materials such as concrete plex, plywood, fire-resistant boards, OSB, plasterboard, doors, etc. Everything is made to measure, so many orders are a collection of various types of material. To package those orders as efficiently and safely as possible, they are bundled and wrapped into one package. For the forklift driver it is inefficient to remove the correct number of boards of each type from the racks and move them onto the packaging line. So a customised solution was required.
Solution
Inefficiency, that’s something they don’t appreciate at Stiho. Which works out well because we are allergic to that too at Certis Benelux, so we grabbed this challenge with both hands. With our help, the packaging line was fitted with three workstations with a lift system. The forklift driver takes a large pack of boards from the stock and places them on a workstation. There, an operator piles the correct number of boards on the lift. He does the same at the next station, until the right number of each type of board is prepared. The compiled package is then sent to the packaging machine fully automatically by a chain conveyor.
The horizontal ring wrapper automatically positions itself correctly on the basis of the size of the pile. After that, one press of the button suffices to have all the boards wrapped into one package and taken to the transport line.
Result
Thanks to the combination of the adjustable lift and ring wrapper, an order comprising different types of construction panel can quickly and automatically be bundled into one stable package. As a result, order picking, and by extension, the entire logistical flow, now runs far more efficiently.
