When Plant Manager Keith Hussinger joined Kelly-Moore at their San Carlos, California headquarters four years ago, one thing was clear; Kelly-Moore’s manufacturing process had not kept pace with the advances in the company’s product lines.
As an employee-owned company, Kelly-Moore has a strong focus on the safety and ergonomic issues concerning their employees; however, hand palletizing of products weighing up to 70 pounds and production flow inefficiencies pointed to some obvious areas needing improvement. Even with a vacuum assist, the manual lifting was an issue of worker comfort as well as production efficiency.
The building selected to receive upgrades would soon begin production of Kelly-Moore’s most advanced – and most technically difficult – product lines. These lines typically have smaller runs with a higher SKU change rate, demanding flexibility in both the production and the handling of product. At this point, the Kelly-Moore team, led by Hussinger, actively set out to find a material handling partner who could meet the company’s needs.
An Engineered Solution
With strict space limitations in the building, the Intelligrated team set out to design the most compact solution for the building’s manufacturing processes.
Building columns set in the middle of the room made fitting the palletizing cells a tight squeeze with only inches to spare. The system designers wanted to ensure that Kelly-Moore would not have to make any structural changes to the building to accommodate its final design.
The Kelly-Moore manufacturing process revolves around four lines: two lines handling smaller, conventional gallon and quart paint cans; and the other two handling larger, five gallon pails. It was decided that two robotic arms would meet the palletizing rates that Kelly-Moore required.
In this case, the Alvey robotic palletizing system used robotic arms sourced from long-time partner Motoman.
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