Oh how I love Chicago. It’s a great American city filled with beautiful old-world architecture, great food, awesome jazz and some of the friendliest people on earth.
Unfortunately for six months a year, the weather is just about as brutal as nighttime on Mars. So of course, that’s when Material Handling Institute holds the bi-annual ProMat Exhibit, right on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the shadow of Soldier Field. The wind was howling, the temperature dropped to something near 0 and the snow started falling two hours before my return flight. But while there, I think I made the best of a bad weather situation. Here are a few thoughts about some of the technology I saw.
First about a show called Automate which was co-located with ProMat. Automate is a type of nirvana for robot geeks. Aisle after aisle of robots, end effectors and various sensors and probes. After the first two aisles I started noticing two trends.
The first was with the robot producers or integrators showing their latest palletizing wonders. They all did a marvelous job of picking up nice square or rectangular boxes from a single line of conveyor and every one of them created the perfect palletized load. They called this “mixed sku palletizing”. Very impressive! But I was hoping someone would show me how they pick up a wide variety of shapes and sizes from multiple lines coming at different speeds and then use a vision system and software to create a load of mixed product. Sorry, not this year. Actually, I do know a company with the capability to pull that one off. They’re some friends of mine from Canada but they chose not to exhibit at Promat this time. If that application interests you and you have a real need to solve that problem in your operation, give me a call and we’ll work with them to create a solution for you.
The second trend I noticed was with those lightning-fast spider robots. Man, they just keep getting faster and faster all the time. The first six I saw were even more impressive than the robots palletizing nice square boxes. These displays showed me how I can take a bunch of little Scrabble blocks and put them in lines that spell my company’s name, or how I can take ping pong balls and sort them by color into little cups. Some moved candy with blinding speed into and out of a box. Wow! Maybe my expectations were too high. I was looking for someone who can take a jumble of various sized boxes and bags, singulate them and then orient them properly and line them up like little solders so I can convey them through a print and apply cell. You know, real world stuff. All kidding aside, nearly every one of those companies in the Automate area said they can do this for me—they just weren’t showing anything so mundane as a real application for distribution.
After the fourth aisle my eyes glazed over. I started thinking about reaching into one of the robot cells to spin a box just to see what would happen. I must have gotten too close to one of the safety devices and a robot stopped dealing cards into little boxes and about five Asian Engineers came running. Some guy from Security suggested it might be time for me to go into the other hall to visit the ProMat show and I thought that was a good idea too.
The Second Part of My Winter Vacation…..
I think this was my 15th pilgrimage to Chicago for ProMat and every time I’m at the show I find little gold nuggets to bring back to my clients. This year I found several and I’d like to tell you about three of them.
Schaefer Systems had, in my opinion, the best example of a Goods-to-Person picking display at the show. Goods-to-Person is a system which automatically stores toted products in rack, shelving or carousels and delivers at very high rates to a central picking area. The picking station is set up to assist the picker in every way imaginable; sequencing the product, tilting the tote for better ergonomics, light or laser direction to identify the correct item, voice or displays to tell the picker the quantity to pick, single order pick or batch picking. I like Schaefer’s design because of the overall ergonomics and how it can be adapted to a variety of storage systems in the background. Schaefer also has a number of variations of their GTP station so they can adapt to just about any order selection situation.
A new company on the scene is OPEX with a product called Perfect Pick. This is a storage/retrieval system with a simple Goods-To-Person (GTP) picking front end. In reality, OPEX has been around for about 40 years but primarily known in the high speed mail handling and sortation niche. The Perfect Pick is the evolution of one of their products on that side of the business.
Jeff Hedges, the President of the material handling side of OPEX, is an old friend of mine. He sees OPEX as a machine builder, not an integrator. Which is where TriFactor Solutions comes in. Our ability to do the data analysis and configuration needed for Perfect Pick and TriFactor’s expertise with integrating picking technology with conveyors, sortation and distribution software makes this an ideal addition to our portfolio of solutions.
The third item that caught my eye was a print and apply system from Bell & Howell. They had a number of technologies like liner less printer applicator and high speed pneumatic style printing systems. But the item that caught everyone’s attention was a high throughput gantry style labeling system.
This servo driven gantry system is capable of very high speeds, in excess of 70 ppm, and is capable of managing a wide variety of carton heights and shapes. I think this system will be a game changer for many of our clients that do high volume but have resisted automatic labeling because of their range of carton sizes. The days of manual label application are coming to an end. Give us a call to discuss your labeling needs.
Naturally I saw much more technology at ProMat but I wanted to pass along three items that are immediately useful to my customers. I saw some innovative sortation systems, interesting pallet flow concepts and a briefcase full of other useful products and subsystems. The technology is out there if you’re willing to be open minded and spend a little time investigating how to apply it in your operation. I’m ready when you are.
