£1million conveyor system matches company's growth
October 1st 2008 A conveyor system capable of handling 1000 orders an hour
with minimal manual handling and provision for extension
in the future has been completed by European Conveyor
Systems Ltd for specialist toy and gift retailer Tobar Ltd
Following rapid expansion over the last
few years, Tobar moved into a purposebuilt
head office and warehouse costing
around £10 million near Beccles, Suffolk. The
footprint of the building is 10,000m2, and the
bulk storage area alone has over 6000 pallet
spaces for the 2500 product lines currently
stocked by the company, which runs
wholesale, mail order and retail operations.
While all order picking operations were
carried out manually at the previous
premises, which involved operatives walking
long distances, the ECS conveyor system links
a number of picking zones on two mezzanine
floors with consolidation and packing areas
on the ground floor. It also delivers products
to the picking zones on the upper floors to
replenish stocks there. Altogether, the system
includes nearly 1000 metres of conveyor.
As the main elements of the installation
are modular, future expansion – such as
additional picking or packing zones – can
be achieved reasonably quickly, and
controls and electric wiring are also
designed to accommodate future changes.
The conveyor system is designed to handle
plastic tote bins and good quality cardboard
cartons with four-digit bar-code labels that
enable them to be routed to the required
picking zones and packing area for each order.
While the company currently uses 600mm x
400mm totes with the short edge leading, the
conveyors installed by ECS are 650mm wide
to allow bigger totes to be used in the future.
Each order-pick starts with Tobar's
warehouse management system issuing a
unique bar code label that holds the
destinations for each carton or tote. An
operator based on the second floor
mezzanine then places an empty tote/carton
with that label on to the conveyor at the
order induct station, and the tote and order
manifest are 'married' by a hand-held scanner.
Each tote is routed automatically to the next
appropriate pick zone as its label is read by the
bar-code scanners positioned around the
conveyor system. Staff at any pick zone can add
extra bins to accommodate an order if the first
one becomes full. Once an order is complete
the totes are routed automatically to the correct
packing spur. Separate areas are designated
for packing single-tote and multi-tote orders.
In order to check that an order has been
picked correctly, before each bin leaves the
picking area it is weighed and the weight
checked against a figure calculated by the
warehouse management system when the
order was originally initiated.
Bins with completed correct orders are
delivered by the conveyor system to one of
two packing areas on the ground floor,
depending on whether a single bin or
multiple bins make up an order. In order to
speed up the final packing process, a
message display board in the consolidation
area tells packing staff in which section of the
despatch matrix a completed order should be
placed. A re-circulation loop provides buffer
storage when the packing areas are busy.
The conveyors used for this installation
have aluminium side channels with plastic
inserts that provide a smooth snag-free
external surface, which improves safety and
convenience for staff. Plastic roller-carriers
ensure a quiet-running installation, and sections
of the system turn off automatically when they
are not in use, which reduces power demand.
The warehouse computer system linked
to the ECS installation provides a wide
variety of information about order progress,
system functionality and other matters and
also allows faults to be diagnosed and
rectified through a modem link. More articles from European Conveyor Systems Ltd: | 
