Modernisation of Material Handling and Warehousing Techniques

The optimum organisation of material flow and material handling techniques makes it possible to provide necessary building and delivery elements just in time and at favourable costs. Ever since storage costs have been analysed from an economical point of view, more and more companies are focusing on efficient warehousing. The first simple warehousing systems appeared in the early 60's. Since the beginning of the 80's due to the development of PLC and PC-systems, we have seen the building of automatic high-shelving warehouses.

The maintenance of the controlling-hardware established then, is no longer carried out by the respective manufacturers. The programmers of that time are either no longer available or, due to a lack of documentation, do not know their own programs anymore.

The objective is to implement the new control-systems with the lowest possible interruption times in the retrieval process. For example, we managed to change a high-shelving warehouse consisting of 4 major gangways, which included retrieval and despatching of goods as well as several commissioning positions, piece by piece from the existing SIMATIC S5 controller to the new PLC S7-400 system, without disturbing the daily operation.

After a detailed inspection of the existing system including a comprehensive analysis of the old PLC software and its connection with the super-imposed warehouse-PC, we re-established the PLC software for the shelf-retrieval  tools and the retrieval routes.