VLM helps organize thousands of small sheet metal pieces

Architectural Grille is a 40-employee, family-run shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., that makes custom grilles for heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems. Its customers include architects, designers, contractors and homeowners. The company uses around 50,000 pounds of sheet metal every month. A vertical lift module (Vidmar, stanleyvidmar.com) enabled the company to store and organize random pieces of metal that would otherwise become scrap.

Over time, the company has accumulated thousands of small pieces that have been left over after full sheets have been cut. Because the cutoffs are large enough to be used for new grilles, it doesn’t make sense to discard them, but their non-uniform sizes make them a challenge to track.

“Over the years we’ve been stacking them in racks, one on top of the other,” says company vice president Anthony Giumenta Jr. “There was no system for tracking this varied stock, so workers that needed a small piece would either take hours looking for it—a waste of valuable time—or would cut one from a full sheet, which is an inefficient use of valuable materials.”

Then Giumenta saw a vertical lift module (VLM) at a trade show. As many as 240 racks are stacked inside the tower. Stored items are inventoried using a touch-screen computer running a Windows XP-based software program with a graphical user interface. “Setup only took a couple of days,” says Giumenta. “And it took just a couple of more days for my guys to learn how to use the software.”

To load the machine, the operator takes a piece of small scrap, measures and weighs it, and enters it into the computer before placing it in one of the racks. Filling the machine with the backlog of scrap took some time: Architectural Grille’s VLM has 160 racks that hold 551 pounds of scrap metal, for a total of 18,000 pounds of material. But now, the shop has developed an efficient system of logging in and storing cutoffs as they become available.