Textiles
Bru Textiles
Bru Textiles, a leading provider of furnishing
and upholstery fabrics, today distributes over
ten million meters of fabric produced mainly
from India, Bangladesh and Africa.
The fabrics come from suppliers in rolls about
1.6 meters long and in varying diameters,
according to the type of product. The ever
increasing demands for the handling of both
inbound and outbound of these rolls entailed
considerable effort from the logistics
department. In the legacy system the handling
of the linen rolls were within metal baskets
positioned on conventional storage racks,
moved through out the warehouse by
traditional forklift trucks. Operators were
managed by their internal WMS in their Dayto- Day operations.
With the new requirement to store 120,000
linen rolls, the need for an automated
warehouse became apparent. Automha was
up to the challenge while also improving
productivity and reducing “Pick Errors”.
The proposed solution has created a fully
automated warehouse for the 120,000+unit
load capacity, handled by 13 stacker cranes
through a building area of 52,000 Square Ft.
The goods, always labeled with a barcode to
ensure the traceability of each roll, is unloaded
from containers by two telescopic belt
conveyors that lead to Bru Textiles ID control
stations.
1300 South Service Rd., West, Oakville, Ont L6L5T7 | Tel.: 1.855.725.5786 | [email protected]
The rolls that fail the quality control checks
flow into a titling station, where they are sorted
according to the type of problem found. The
remaining rolls will proceed toward the lower
part of the warehouse, where 3 rolls will be
assigned to a transfer car to be transported
into the warehouse to 1 of 6 aisles. Here,
thanks to 7 belt conveyors, the rolls are
unloaded from the shuttle and picked up by the
stacker crane, which enters the rolls in
storage. Up to 7 rolls are stored on a specially
designed cradle to avoid the damaging of the
rolls.
One of the biggest strengths of the system
designed by Automha is the ability to never leave
any empty location: when a roll is picked from
inventory, in fact, the location is immediately
filled by another roll entered in stock. This
allows you to never have any cradle with empty
locations. When the rolls are called by the
system to the exit, the stacker crane travels to
the indicated position and proceeds with the
withdrawal and delivers the cradles to a multilevel machine (one for each stacker). Capable
of sorting 21 rolls, the multi-level machine with
telescopic forks pulls the individual rolls and at
the same time ensuring that all cradles are
returned with a full 7 rolls to inventory.
(Ensuring 100% utilization in the storage).
At the end of the line, the rolls placed in the
shuttles are taken by a Gantry robot that
predisposes the load in a single batch for
delivery or for cutting. Once completed, the
batch flows into a second warehouse, utilizing
an additional stacker crane handling totes,
from which operators shall manage the final
picking and shipping of finished rolls.
Thanks to the solution proposed by Automha,
Bru Textiles can today boast the world’s largest
automatic warehouse for storage of Linen rolls.
1300 South Service Rd., West, Oakville, Ont L6L5T7 | Tel.: 1.855.725.5786 | [email protected]