Material Delivery and Dunnage Removal Conveyor system for Parallel Assembly Line, Overhead Material Delivery System

A vehicle manufacturer was looking for a new method to deliver materials for the assembly of vehicles to four parallel assembly lines. IK developed, engineered, and implemented an overhead pallet conveyor system that provided great benefits to the vehicle manufacturer.

The Problem

Time & Traffic. The existing method for material delivery and removal was delivery by forklift around the ends of the assembly line. This resulted in long fork trips for each load in and each load of packing materials and empty pallets out. This created a large cost in labor for material transport. The number of forklifts required to support the lines this way created a large amount of traffic in narrow aisles.

The Solution

Industrial Kinetics developed a pallet conveyor system that deliver materials to each assembly line around the midpoint of the parallel assembly lines. We accomplished this by locating an inbound and an outbound conveyor perpendicular to the assembly lines at the midpoint of the lines, at the receiving dock. The material would accumulate, and elevate one pallet at a time to an overhead pallet conveyor loop. The pallets would convey on this loop to one of four lowerators. The lowerator would lower the load to ground level and accumulate for forktruck pickup. Adjacent to each of the four lowerators we incorporated four lifts with inbound accumulation for the removal of packing materials and empty pallets. The packing material would be conveyed out to an accumulation conveyor immediately next to the inbound material accumulation conveyor. This eliminated the long forklift trips around the end of line. This is like using the Panama Canal rather than travel through the Strait of Magellan, on a much smaller scale. This system eliminated an approximately 2,000 ft fork truck trip per pallet.