Conveyor designed for beverage industry offers advantages in DC

Motion Industries Canada opened two new distribution centers in August 2011, one in Edmonton and another in Montreal, replacing its single DC in Montreal and nearly quadrupling its size to 100,000 square feet. After installing an ultra-low-friction conveyor, the company has reduced noise, energy usage and handling inconsistencies.

Both new facilities have a conventional layout with shipping and receiving on opposite ends of the building and shelved inventory in the center. The shelves branch off at right angles to the shipping conveyor, which runs down the center of the layout to a 90-degree turn and then to a 180-degree turn leading to five shipping lanes, each for a specific Canadian province.

The facilities pick 2,000 to 2,400 lines per day for shipments bound for the company’s 70 Canadian branches. They also pick about 200 orders per day for direct shipment to customers. Each line may consist of many pieces of a specific product. Motion’s prior DC used two-level gravity and powered roller conveyor. According to Tom Sawyer, Motion’s distribution center director, the new conveyor (Emerson Industrial Automation, emersonindustrial.com) is much quieter, vastly improving the work environment.

“The new setup has proven very reliable, conveying totes without the drift that can occur on a gravity roller conveyor,” Sawyer says. “It is also ideal for a compact system layout. For example, we did a 180-degree turn in a 6-foot radius, measured on the outside of the conveyor.”

The new combination of conveyor chain and wear strips has a coefficient of friction of just 0.16, reducing energy consumption by about 25% compared to standard chains and wear strips. Each system includes a section of about 40 feet of accumulation conveyor with a specially designed surface that minimizes load, energy use and maintenance. Manual sortation to shipping lanes will soon be upgraded to automated sorting.