As plant manager at Rocon Manufacturing in Rochester, N.Y., David Storie oversees the company's production of castings for a variety of industries. Storie wanted to find an alternative to manual lifting that would be as accurate as a human without the risk and cost of operator injury. In short, he needed a system that would maximize both safety and productivity.

'I also wanted a system that eliminated the operator having to actuate a lift, something that didn't have forward and backward buttons and just one or two speeds,' he says. 'We needed a system that could give us accurate positioning without limiting the speed of the operator.'

The answer is an intelligent lifting device that is now used in a work cell that manufactures castings for a leading manufacturer of air conditioning units. This work cell spans a 40-foot x 100-foot area and houses five operators.

The operators were manually lifting 55-pound castings measuring 12 inches x 15 inches x 5 inches. They were responsible for taking the castings out of the box, loading them two at a time into two separate twin-spindle CNC milling machines and then removing them one at a time from the machine and placing them onto a conveyor. The operators repeated this lifting and twisting routine 65 times a day, for a cumulative daily load of roughly 3,500 pounds per operator.

Now the intelligent lift device loads two castings at a time into the machines and then removes them. When needed, the device can handle loads of different weights with no obvious difference to the operator.