Sweden’s first Compact Lift 4000 up and running
At the turn of the year, the Intaga Group gathered its Sweden-based companies in newly built, large production and warehouse premises in Torpa, north of Varberg. The following companies are gathered here: Manovi, the subcontractor; Cremo Boats, the boat builder; Cremo Carbox, the roof box manufacturer; and Grad-in, the radiator importer.
When planning the large, shared warehouse, an expert consultant was hired to optimize the logistics. His requirements specification for vertical storage lift machinery was suitable for several suppliers. The choice fell on our new Compact Lift 4000, which beat the competition, and now with its first installation in Sweden.
Competitive solution
– The consultant was well prepared and knew exactly what they wanted. The desire was a clean storage solution “goods-to-man” that could accommodate as many warehouse products in as little floor space as possible. Now that we have a four-meter wide Compact Lift in the standard range, we were able to offer a very competitive solution. We delivered the vertical storage lift in November; it has a 175 sqm storage capacity using 13.5 sqm of floor space. At 8.3 meters high, it accommodates 50 load trays that can be loaded with 500 kg each, says Sam Andreasen, sales representative at Weland Solutions.
It’s worth spending time on the groundwork
– In the beginning, we initially thought that we would have items from all four companies in this vertical storage lift, but in the end we only filled it with parts and accessories for Grad-in’s radiators and underfloor heating. More lifts may be needed in the future. The consultant helped us to calculate the best content, specify the right number of articles, package sizes and how much storage space each article would need. The groundwork is extremely important and after three months we conducted an audit where the Compact Store program also helped to optimize efficiency so that the items most in demand were placed closer together and further down in the machine for faster handling, says Amanda Svensson, warehouse manager at Intaga.
Streamlined when things are well organized
– We have a massive warehouse with lots of large boxes and articles. In the Compact Lift, we have collected a lot of items that are picked individually from customer orders. We notice that there is much better organization among the broken packagings and, articles for underfloor heating systems for example, are stored on the same tray to be picked at the same time. There are perhaps 400 items in the lift today and there are five people managing it. Although the system is not difficult to learn, it takes some time to get everyone to change their way of working. It’s actually quite fun to operate and very rewarding when all arrives at the right height. But you have to understand how it works, smiles Amanda.
Compact Lift 4000, an affordable first solution
– Intaga chose a Compact Lift 4000 as its first vertical warehouse lift. Because it is a standard product, it became a very affordable and surface-efficient warehouse solution that suited parts of their inventory needs. In this instance, they use the simplest standard software within the Compact Store that linked up to their ERP system Visma. Because they wanted to experiment with different ways of doing things, this became a perfect solution. Accessories and extra features can always be applied later, concludes Sam Andreasen.
