The scaffolding systems manufacturer is building a production line in Güglingen-Cleebronn, Germany and awarded a contract to Demag to design and implement the corresponding automated crane, materials handling system and safety equipment.
It will install five automated process cranes to ensure tubes will be effectively stored, picked, and supplied on time with a material flow to manufacture components for scaffolding. The planned throughput for the plant is 120,000 tons per year and 25 tons per hour.
Demag is implementing a complete system solution for the ground-level and overhead material flows, including the corresponding long material store.
“We’re glad that we were able to win this very challenging contract. The complexity is the result not just of the turnkey delivery and planning scope, but also of the fact that a lot of unique requirements had to be considered during planning together with our customer Layher,” said Thomas Bönker, senior VP, process cranes, Demag.
“Thanks to this partnership, which was already initiated at an earlier stage, we were able to identify and exploit significant potential for improvements in advance.”
Layher is planning to build an independent plant in Güglingen-Cleebronn for the production and hot-dip galvanizing of parts for its all-round scaffolding system. Plant 3 will cover an area of approximately 11 hectares, of which around five will consist of roofed production and storage areas.
The production process for the entire location is scheduled to start in 2023: This means galvanizing the scaffolding elements and, depending on the specific component, the corresponding hot working, ledger welding, standard element welding, and assembly as well.
Bundles of tubes will be delivered from various production plants and then placed in Demag stacking racks at transfer stations to the inbound goods storage area.
After the material data is captured by the Demag Warehouse Management System (WMS) and registered with the customer’s SAP Hana system, two Demag crane systems take care of the automated material transport operation.
To do this, the cranes, which have an 8 ton load capacity and 25m span, store the stacking racks until they are called up for production.
The WMS will use various parameters to determine the storage locations for the bundles of tubes, which will vary in terms of length and wall thickness. The crane systems will also take care of automated stock retrieval. To this end, the bundles of tubes will be placed on one of three conveyor lines that will then transfer the bundles to the intended production area.
In future, three additional automatic cranes with span dimensions of 11m and a load capacity of 8 tons will operate in the ledger-welding/cutting areas and in the hot working area. These process cranes will transport the individual bundles to the intermediate storage areas upstream of production – alternatively, they will also take care of serving individual machines with stock directly.
In addition, the Demag WMS system will incorporate and process production plans and data from the Layher quality assurance system.
In the production area, bundles of tubes will be temporarily stored on a platform above the processing machines with a planned buffer of one production day to ensure that material is supplied quickly.
The Demag WMS system will organize retrieval operations on the FIFO principle and will be able to re-organise stock to create stacks of bundles of the same type when workloads are low, for example. It will also be able to transfer material between the two bays.
