Stanley Vidmar goes beyond the tool box

Stanley Vidmar takes modular storage to another level in the manufacturing plant and DC.

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 7/24/2007

If you’re like us, you hear Stanley and you think tool boxes. Craig McCoy, director of sales for Stanley Vidmar would beg to differ.

We recently caught up with McCoy to find out what is changing in the world of drawer storage.

“Yes, we started off doing metal tool cribs and we still make the highest quality boxes in the business,” says McCoy. “But a lot of that business has gone off shore, which has forced us to develop new products for new markets and customers we may not have thought about in the past.”

Instead of boxes, McCoy says Stanley Vidmar sells “storage solutions for small to medium parts.”

That’s everything from drawer cabinets designed for a hospital operating room, for the automotive assembly line and even the storage area in a nuclear submarine.

“We’re storing everything from catheters and suture kits to bulk pallets that weigh up to 4,000 pounds,” McCoy says.

Stanley Vidmar has also created automated drawer storage systems to compete with carousels and vertical lift modules.

“Our system uses an extractor to remove a drawer from the storage unit and deliver it to a receiving window,” says McCoy. “Since the drawer can be compartmentalized, you don’t have to be concerned with the size and shape of the part you’re storing in the drawer.”

Likewise, the location of parts in an automated system can be managed with a software solution that works much like a warehouse management system (WMS) to track the putaway location of inventory and update quantities as items are removed.

As end users, especially manufacturers, turn to RFID to track high value assets like tools on the plant floor, Stanley has designed an RFID solution that allows the RFID-tagged parts to be read through closed storage drawers.

“RFID is expensive,” says McCoy. “But in the aviation industry, where we have a strong presence, they store very expensive parts and tools. For them, this is a viable solution.”

The larger point, McCoy adds “is that drawer storage has evolved. We can still sell a static box to the customer that just needs to store hardware and tools. Or, we can provide a very sophisticated solution for a highly-automated environment.”