From the beginning, there wasn't much question that Graco Children's Products was trying to fit too much into too small a space. But it had to be done.

Quite simply, the company needed to close a 300,000 square foot injection molding facility in Canton, Ohio which also served as a warehouse and assembly area. The company was moving those operations to a like-size child car seat assembly operation in nearby Macedonia. In other words, the company needed to combine the molding and assembly operations in a single 320,000 square foot facility and not miss a beat.

And the stakes were huge. On the table were several million dollars in annual savings due to reduced rent and lower operating costs.

Since the injection molding machines weren't going to fit in a smaller footprint than before, major changes to the assembly operations were necessary. To begin, the assembly area itself was reconfigured. But that wasn't enough. Still more space was needed for the handling and movement of finished goods. Expanding the building's footprint was not an option.

That's when things started to look up, recalls Randy Koehler, senior project engineer. Up on the wall, that is.

Today, Graco has over 800 feet of conveyor that transports finished goods from assembly to warehousing mounted 13 feet above the floor. The $1 million project (Forte Industries) also uses five vertical lifts to move cartons from the floor to the conveyor.

Beyond opening up valuable floor space, the overhead conveyor also resulted in improved materials flow. As a result, Graco cut by half both the number of warehouse workers required to stage finished product for shipping, as well as the forklift trucks they operated. Graco now uses a maximum of three forklift operators during each of its three daily shifts.

The consolidation is part of an ongoing cost cutting effort by parent Newell Rubbermaid following its purchase of Graco/Century and their complementary product lines. When Graco bought Century some time ago, it failed to rationalize operations. As a result, it was time to make some adjustments.

During the consolidation, the move to the overhead conveyor was not a first thought during the consolidation, says Koehler. After all, the ceiling is only 19 feet high, making the overhead solution practical but not necessarily obvious.

Today, the conveyor carries finished products from a series of work cells located in the 100,000 square foot assembly area to a single staging area in the 100,000 square foot adjoining warehouse. Boxed products are stacked there manually then palletized and shrink wrapped for shipment to customers such as Target, Toys 'R Us and Wal-Mart.

Macedonia's operational savings are due to the overhead conveyor's rapid delivery of finished product to the single warehouse location. When the facility was dedicated to assembly, a series of floor-level conveyors fed product to discrete stations at the end of each production line, an inefficient use of floor space. Forklifts then carried those finished goods several hundred feet to a pallet-building station in the adjoining warehouse. That's where goods were stacked and wrapped before being placed into storage.

Eliminating these discrete product collection stations translates into better utilization of premium space on the assembly floor. It also means significantly less materials handling in terms of manpower and equipment, Koehler says. Cutting forklift use also results in less congestion and fewer accidents, he adds.

In addition, a recently installed warehouse management system allows Graco to better synchronize warehouse operations and order fulfillment, leading to additional cost savings, Koehler says.

Even though the conveyor is mounted on the wall 13 feet above the floor, its modular design makes it relatively easy for Graco to reconfigure the hardware to further accommodate the addition of new equipment on the floor. Although there are no current plans to make specific changes, Koehler says that option will certainly be considered when appropriate.

At the end of the assembly and cartooning process, workers place a box on a waist-high conveyor adjacent to their work cells for delivery to a nearby carton sealing station. That transfer to the conveyor is the last time the carton is handled manually until it's palletized in the warehouse.

The 28-inch wide carton-sealer takeaway conveyor, which is identical to the branch lines that serve the work cells, subsequently delivers sealed boxes to the vertical lifts.

The lifts, which vertically conveys the box on a hinged, continuously moving platform, quickly carries the packages to the overhead belt-driven conveyor. As many as 25 to 30 boxes per minute arrive on the overhead conveyor for delivery to the adjacent warehouse. As the conveyor approaches the warehouse, it declines gradually until it gets to ground level, delivering finished goods to the facility's pallet-building station.

Warehouse personnel then sort the products when building pallets that ultimately are shrink wrapped. A forklift moves the palletized load to storage, where it will stay until picked for shipment to one of Graco's retailers.