Powered roller conveyor smoothes printer customization
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 9/15/1999
Daily, at its manufacturing facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, Tektronix customizes hundreds of its new, popular, four-color printers. A down-and-back powered roller conveyor line transports the printers to a series of workstations for the customization process.The 136 ft final assembly conveyor line is equipped with 127 individual power zones that direct printers on slave pallets to workstations in eight major areas.
In addition to keeping the footprint of the system to a minimum, only 9,700 sq ft, the system offers Tektronix maximum control over the configuration process, says, Doug Henkel, manufacturing engineer. As a result, Henkel says the company has the ability to manage the process in whatever order needed to meet the day's orders as well as accommodate surges in throughput at the end of the quarter.
Pallet loads of nearly completed printers arrive from Japan and are temporarily stored before delivery to the unpacking station at the beginning of the assembly line. Parts needed to customize the printers are stored in a mezzanine area on flow rack and shelves in another section of the warehouse.
After completion of the day's build order, lift truck drivers are instructed how many of which printer models to deliver to the unpack area in manufacturing. In the small parts area, paper pick lists guide workers selecting items needed for final assembly of those printers. Carts of these parts replenish flow racks located at the various workstations along the final assembly line in the facility.
In the unpack area, a worker removes each carton from the pallet using an ergonomic lift and places it on a short roller conveyor. At the end of that line, the carton is manually pushed onto a ball transfer table where it is opened and the dunnage removed. An ergonomic lift then transfers the printer from the carton to a plywood slave pallet. A worker places dunnage and the carton on a takeaway conveyor for delivery to the packing and shipping station at the end of the manufacturing conveyor line. There the materials will be reused to ship printers coming off the line.
Before the printer leaves unpacking, a worker scans its bar coded model and serial numbers. This generates both a new bar code label used only to identify the printer on the production line and a paper printout of the hardware, software, and configuration needed to meet the customer's requirements. The bar code label is applied to the printout and scanned as needed at workstations.
Although used to identify the printer, bar codes do not direct pallets to the appropriate workstations. On the side of each pallet is a reflective sliding square and a series of numbers corresponding to the individual workstations. In the unpack area, a worker sets the slider over the number designating the first workstation the pallet needs to visit.
Along the side of the main conveyor, a photo eye sees the slider and indicates to the conveyor control system where the pallet needs to be delivered. When all tasks are completed at the workstation, the worker moves the slider to the next number and releases it to the line.
The photo eyes also serve another purpose - providing data needed by the software that controls conveyor operation. Acting as sensors, the photo eyes indicate when a pallet is or is not occupying each of the 127 power zones. This causes the software to activate or deactivate power in the zones.
The intelligent conveyor that feeds the workstations is a center-driven roller design. At the induction point for each workstation, that zone of roller conveyor is deactivated and the pallet comes to a stop. A chain-driven transfer then pops up between the rollers and reroutes the pallet.
At the end of the line, the printer is transferred to the parallel intelligent conveyor for the return trip to the final workstations leading to packaging and shipping. There, completed printers are repacked in the boxes they originally arrived in and labeled for final shipment.
Flostor Engineering
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