Investing on automatic warehouse management systems: a case history

Since the late 1960s, DimaSimma has designed and created high quality automatic warehouse management systems for every industrial sector. Among the many testimonies of the reliability and high quality of the Italian company's installations there is Aluminios Cortizo, aluminium extrusion specialist with a yearly production of about 55,000 tons.

Beside the quality and innovation in production, since many years the Spanish company Aluminios Cortizo has been focusing on the service and the minimization of delivery times as required by the market. In 2005, the company charged DimaSimma to design and install an automatic warehouse for 3,000 tons of mill finish profiles, integrated with a “Pick-to-light system” for maximizing the service to the coating line. The “Pick-to-light” system enables to minimize the times, by enabling the preparation of more orders at once. It consists of an area with several supports for skids/baskets, each one corresponding to a color. The software of the warehouse individuates the profiles that are common to more orders, and the work starts by sending to the exit station a skid/basket with a profile that must be painted in several colors.

Two workers in this area see on a monitor the total quantity of bars to extract for this specific profile section, and place them all on the service trolley. The system indicates with a blinking light the position where the workers must place the quantity of profiles indicated in the monitor. The workers confirm the execution, and another blinking light indicates the next position where to leave a certain quantity of the same profile section, and so on. While the workers are completing the job with the first profile section, the warehouse has already put at disposal the skid/basket with the second section. The advantages of this system, compared with the traditional walking up and down of couples of workers carrying profiles, are evident: minimization of time, labor and human error. Few years laters in 2008 Aluminios Cortizo entrusted again a mission in another strategic area to DimaSimma: the realization of an automatic warehouse for dies. DimaSimma set up a warehouse for 28,000 dies, integrated with the die shop, nitruration area and the service area for the 8 presses of the factory.

Appreciating the results of integrated logistics, Aluminios Cortizo decided to invest also in the area of finished products and therefore placed again an order to DimaSimma for the automation of this area. In 2014 DimaSimma performed the startup of a third automatic warehouse for 3,500 tons of profiles, with an automatic Pick to Light for preparing the profiles for the packaging machines and delivery, extending the same advantages already experimented years before with the first warehouse.

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