A warehouse distributing flat-packed and home goods on behalf of one of the world's leading home retailers, is benefiting from vastly enhanced productivity and goods throughput, following investment in new automated strapping technology supplied by Cambridgeshire-based Cyklop UK Ltd.
NDL UK Ltd, part of the worldwide Norbert Dentressangle Group, operates the retailer's warehouse at Armthorpe near Doncaster from a 1.4 million sq ft warehouse from where a range of furniture is dispatched to stores nationwide.
Depending on their dimensions, which can range from 500mm to 1300m in height and from 500mm to 1100mm in width, the consignments are loaded onto either Euro pallets or special length pallets, ready for strapping.
The company was previously strapping manually using a reel and hand buckles, but a number of factors led NDL UK to move towards automation, as the company's Richard Cawston explained.
"Hand strapping was not only highly labour intensive, but also created possible health and safety issues with regard to the manual handling of product and the proximity of staff to other handling equipment. We were also finding that strapping quality was not consistent, nor was the process able to keep pace with our growing throughput.
"We investigated a number of suppliers and were recommended to Cyklop who were happy for us to talk to their customers and see similar equipment in action elsewhere. They also came up with a highly innovative system design."
The equipment supplied by Cyklop consists of four XP112MVB vertical strapping machines mounted onto Cyklop conveyors which vary from 8m to 12m in length and interface automatically with another conveyor system. The machines are likely to strap around 800,000 pallets in the first year, using a total of 2,500,000 m of Cyklop PET strap, with an increase in throughput projected at 20% for each year thereafter.
Richard Cawston continued: "The addition of the Cyklop equipment has increased throughput twofold, eliminated manual handling and had a major impact on strapping quality and consistency, with a positive impact on overall site productivity levels.
"The machines are versatile enough to cope with the varied pack sizes and sufficiently robust to deliver consistently high quality in a very demanding environment. The machines have proved reliable to date but rapid support is available from Cyklop who are also supplying all of our consumable needs."
David Hearn, Managing Director of Cyklop UK Ltd, added: "This is a very prestigious application for us and one which demonstrates our ability to deliver solutions for high-throughput applications involving loads of varied sizes and weights, when speed is at a premium. We look forward to a long and successful partnership with NDL UK Ltd."
For more information contact Cyklop UK on 01480 216777.