Swedish piston ring maker, Daros, has transformed production efficiency at its Molnlycke factory, near Gothenberg, by switching to overhead conveyors supplied in Britain through ITS (UK).Piston ring maker takes overhead route to transform efficiency Double Your Productivity Swedish piston ring maker, Daros, has transformed production efficiency at its Molnlycke factory, near Gothenberg, by switching to overhead conveyors of the kind supplied in Britain through ITS (UK). Gains cited by Daros include a 15-20% productivity boost, a 90% cut in work-in-progress, and throughput times down from four weeks to 2-4 days. Previously, Daros had used manually-pushed pallet loads of pistons but before making the changeover in 1999 it had considered other pallet movement methods but rejected them owing to poor tracing and bad organisation.
The ergonomics would also have been less attractive because piston rings are handled better when suspended from an overhead conveyor than when lifted from pallets.
By going overhead, Daros also keeps floor space free of clutter and therefore allows safer personnel movement and lean likelihood of product damage.
The chosen investment involves 250m of driven track, 200m of gravity line, 70 twin track trolleys and 100 universal trolleys in the phosphate and laser marking process.
Based on the unique, rotating tube principle, the conveyor connects 13 robotic workstations, with automatic loading/unloading.
Each barcoded trolley of 250kg capacity is under computer control, which marries orders with the unique trolley identification and guides them automatically through the whole process, with real-time feedback on order, trolley and bottleneck status.
The specially-designed overhead trolleys are remarkably flexible, allowing Daros to handle piston rings varying from 200mm to 1400mm in diameter, weighing anywhere between 30kg and 200kg.
In Britain, such overhead conveyor solutions tend to be restricted to non manufacturing sites, like distribution centres, but as Gavin Jones, managing director of ITS (UK) points out, they can be just as useful in many diverse manufacturing settings.
This is especially so now that the recently upgraded trolleys can each carry a 500kg load, with almost no 1imit to the range of attachments for handling the most awkward and sensitive of loads.