Surface Mount Technology Production Equipment
Recently, one of the Rockwell Automation’s manufacturing facilities wanted to improve the availability of Surface Mount Technology (SMT) production equipment, manufacturing engineers looked at a number of improvements including revamping the reel storage and retrieval operations. The facility manufactures printed circuit board assemblies for Rockwell Automation’s industrial control systems. The facility manufactures approximately 500-600 printed circuit board assembly numbers for Rockwell Automation systems.
The facility occupies about 186,000 sq. ft. and employs about 350 people. The company used a combination of three-tired drawer cabinets and metal racks to store reels of SMT components. The reels are placed on high-speed placement machines used in production operations. When a reel had to be replaced on a machine, the operator had to walk to a storage shelf or cabinet, find the correct storage location, retrieve the part and load it into the machine. The entire process has been termed as inefficient. Now, the new vertical carousels have increased the efficiency of the organization. Vertical carousels provide high-density storage with quick access to items via a system of vertically arranged rotating carrier shelves that bring the exact storage position to the operator.
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