Transeuro, a UK-based relocation and removals company, has a new storage depot in London near the famous Wembley stadium that has the capacity to provide safe storage for up to 1,845 standard-sized (20ft) steel containers.
The warehouse provides temporary safekeeping for the property of domestic and business customers internationally. The containers might be holding furniture, office equipment, valuable fine arts, or in fact anything at all.
With goods coming in and moving out on a regular basis, Transeuro required a warehouse management system (WMS) to record the position of each container and enable its retrieval. The WMS, developed specifically for the project, not only interfaces with Transeuro’s own host computer system but also controls a pair of automated overhead travelling cranes that are at the heart of the new £14m ($21m) facility which opened last year.
The cranes were designed, manufactured and installed by Dematic. Spanning 24.5m, they service the entire 8,300m2 square feet of floorspace, enabling the steel containers to be stacked up to six high, in columns that are just 250mm apart. Nearly 60,000m3 of useful storage space is therefore realised within the warehouse but, despite the high density, the average retrieval time for a container is kept down to 15 minutes. Dematic claims that no container in the warehouse will ever take longer than 40 minutes to retrieve.
The two cranes operate side by side and are identical except for their safe working loads: one is rated at 12t and the other at 20t. The steel containers are transported to and from the warehouse on standard trucks and all storage and retrieval operations are performed automatically by the cranes. The WMS maintains a record of the position of each individual container.
Compared to conventional handling methods, Dematic says, the automatic cranes “remove the risk of goods being accidentally damaged, and have allowed Transeuro to provide customers with the highest levels of security”. No human access to the warehouse is required and operation of the cranes’ computer control system is protected by a password. The containers themselves are also unusual, having been specially developed to be extra fire-resistant to protect the contents.
The use of absolute encoders helps the cranes to achieve extremely fine positional control and therefore optimises the use of space. The load lifting attachments grip each corner of the containers, using the twist-lock configuration common to all such units. These attachments also incorporate the ability to rotate loads automatically through 180°, ensuring that, regardless of their orientation when they are delivered, all the containers’ doors are facing the same direction within the warehouse itself.
