Fixed path: Automated facility delivers sustainable growth

Every year, Cox Target Media mails more than 500 million envelopes containing more than 19 billion coupons. Faced with rising variable costs and looming capacity constraints, the company built a new automated facility that doubled production capabilities while reducing labor costs.

“Ultimately our business started to grow in such a way that the more we grew, the more inefficient we became,” says David Fox, vice president of manufacturing for the Largo, Fla.-based company. Coupons had to be manually handled and moved up to a dozen times before they left the plant. “Every time we added volume, we added people to offset the volume.”

In 2003, an internal development team began several years of planning and construction, equipment installation and commissioning. The company officially began producing live product in the second half of 2007 and fully moved to its brand-new, $224-million facility in early 2008.

Starting at the 470,000-square-foot facility’s two printing presses, the coupons are printed and folded into the signatures, which are then wound onto rolls. The rolls of signatures move from an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) buffer storage system to collation, where they are cut into individual coupons, combined with coupons supplied by customers, wrapped in envelopes and packaged into mail trays. The mail trays are sent to high-density storage (HDS) through elevators and conveyors until they are ready to be palletized. The HDS mini-load AS/RS system also holds customer-supplied inserts.

Conveyors transfer mail trays out to be palletized by a robot. Sorting transfer vehicles carry the completed pallets into another buffer storage system before being aggregated for shipment. This 400-foot-long by 80-foot-high unit-load system uses four robotic cranes moving on rails in 50-inch wide aisles. The facility has doubled the company’s maximum printing capacity from 20 billion to 54 billion coupons per year. The redesigned production processes cut manufacturing cycle time from four days down to just four hours.

Daifuku America Corp.
614-863-1888
http://www.daifuku.com