Kellogg's, Battle Creek, Mich., is the world's leading producer of cereal.

Kellogg's had a big decision—repair an aging wire-guided automatic guided vehicle (AGV) system or purchase a new laser-guided one.

Ten years ago, they installed a wire-guided AGV system in one of their busiest cereal manufacturing packaging plants. The AGVs shuttle pallets of boxed cereal between the palletizers, a stretchwrapper, an automated storage and retrieval system and staging lanes for shipment. It helped reduce costs, improve productivity, reduce damage and improve safety. But the system began to degrade and replacement parts were hard to find. Reliability and downtime were a major concern.

There was a 10% savings in repairing the system. However, added speed, performance and flexibility of a new laser-guided system would more than make up for the savings. So they bought a new AGV system.

Kellogg's selected laser-guided vehicles because of the ease and accuracy of reprogramming the vehicle paths. A detailed simulation of materials movement determined that 25 AGVs would be needed to support the plant's throughput. During development, changes to the road systems and materials flow were tested. The laser-guided vehicles allow better routing and tighter traffic management.

Since buying the system, plant efficiency has improved and bottlenecks have been eliminated.

The vehicles receive directions from a supervisory computer that controls and monitors movement of AGVs and communicates with existing programmable logic controllers (PLC) and warehouse management systems to facilitate movement of finished product. The vehicles are also equipped with “hand shake” sensors to coordinate pallet movement with existing plant conveyors.

To avoid production interruptions, tests were performed using a virtual laser-guided system, created to run parallel to the existing wire guided systems. With testing complete, Kellogg's went live with new laser-guided vehicles.

FMC Technologies 215-822-4300 www.fmcgvs.com