| Chemnitz
Kuraray optimises forklift transport in the dispatch area
Kuraray is a global specialty chemicals company and one of the leading suppliers of polymers and synthetic microfibres for a wide range of industries, including KURARAY POVAL™, Mowital®, Trosifol® and CLEARFIL™.
At its site in Troisdorf, Kuraray manufactures glass interlayers for use in safety, sound insulation and UV protection applications.
As part of digitalisation and continuous process improvement, the dispatch area was to be fundamentally optimised. Kuraray uses a total of eleven front-loading forklifts in this area, which retrieve the film rolls from a mobile racking warehouse and consolidate them on a collection area.
The forklift operators were still working entirely manually here. The retrieved containers were checked against a picking list and then crossed off the list. This process is naturally prone to errors if retrieved goods were not crossed off. Goods could also easily be overlooked or even prepared incorrectly.
Apart from these rare cases, there was one key area that needed improvement: support for the forklift driver. Even if there were no errors in the picking process, the forklift driver always had to pay close attention to the process and work through the list with focus to ensure error-free picking.
With the iFD SLS module, transport requirements are collected in a pool, assigned to dispatch orders and allocated to a forklift driver for processing in a paperless manner. The transport orders are generally transferred from Kuraray’s SAP system to the iFD system. A bidirectional IDoc interface was implemented for this purpose.
A confirmation scan ensures that the correct goods have been brought to the correct staging area on the collection floor.
In the age of Industry 4.0 and big data, the forklift guidance system offers yet another enormous benefit: the collection of data on the transport process and its subsequent visualisation in KPIs, statistics and charts. This ensures transparency regarding the internal, forklift-related material flow.
The modular software structure allows for the solution to be gradually expanded into other sections of the plant. The wide range of functions, which has grown steadily over the past decades, enables the rapid and cost-effective integration of further areas into the existing system.
Forklift drivers are now guided digitally through the process and can concentrate on what really matters: transporting the goods.
Contact:
Mr Sebastian Deisinger
Tel.: +49 371 53880 224
