Gruppo Colombini manufactures and distributes furniture for offices, kitchens and bedrooms. Their main Production site at San Marino has been expanded. For the material handling system at this site, Vanderlande Industries was contracted.

The material handling system consists of 3 sub-systems:

1. Sistema Magazzino Semi Lavorato, a storage system to store Work-In-Process pallets before Production.
2. Linea Collegamento, a conveyor system to transport finished products from Production to the Distribution building.
3. Sistema Magazzino Automatico, for finished products, a conveyor and storage system to store and sort to truck destination.

Sistema Magazzino Semi Lavorato:

The Sistema Magazzino Semi Lavorato consists of a rack supported High Bay storage system with initially 3 stacker cranes and a low-bay building, which includes the conveyor receiving, front-end and production connection system. On ground floor, pallets with Work-In-Process products are received from a previous Colombini production site via automatic shuttle trucks. After the automatic receipt of the truck contents, the pallets are checked at an Identification Point and, when approved, stored in the AS/RS system. When the pallets are requested in Production, the stacker cranes retrieve the pallets from the racking and deposit them on one of the levels. A Colombini Automated Guided Vehicle system transports the pallets from the Sistema MSL to Production.  

The Sistema Magazzino Semi Lavorato will be operational in April 2006. 

Linea Collegamento

The Linea Collegamento takes care of conveying all finished three-dimensional cubic finished products from Production to the Sistema Magazzino Automatico. The finished products will leave 5 production machines and the manual infeed station as a finished, packed and labelled product. The Linea Collegamento takes care of transporting products from the second level of the new building to the Magazzino Automatico in the old building.

Sistema Magazzino Automatico

The purpose of the Sistema Magazzino Automatico is to collect and store finished products coming from Production. Via the inbound Posisorter the colli are sorted to one of the 4 storage blocks. The colli are loaded onto trays and subsequently stored in a miniload system. When all customer collis are stored in the Magazzino Automatico and the outbound truck is scheduled to leave, the colli are retrieved from the Magazzino Automatico. Via the front-end system, trays are unloaded. The emptied tray is put into a buffer and the collo is sent to Shipping. In Shipping every truck dock has its own outfeed spur. The outbound POSISORTER™ system in Shipping sorts the colli received from the storage area to the outfeed spur, where the truck for this customer route is docked. At the end of the dock, outfeed spur operators take the colli out of the spur, and, together with the flow of manually handled long and odd-size materials, the colli are loaded into the truck in reversed drop-sequence order. 

Due to the connection to the existing system - the running operation can not be stopped -, the Sistema Magazzino Automatico will be put into operation in phases, the last part starting January 2007. 

Vanderlande Industries supplies the VISION™ Warehouse Management System (WMS).