Offering speed and flexibility, carousels improve the assembly line, orderpicking and dock door operations. Find out how best to use them in your operation.

Eager to select less expensive, less automated storage systems, warehouse professionals often overlook carousels. Vendors and consultants agree that this oversight could be costly as innovative carousel designs are proving indispensable in a wide range of applications. In cross-docking, retail storage and handling manufacturing components—to name just a few—carousels bring utility and efficiency. These automated storage options use little space yet offer high throughput, advancing an operation from paper to automated picking. They can perform both “pick” and “put” functions—orderpicking and order consolidation—because of software controls and WMS integration. In addition, they can be used to handle returns.

“Buyers are sometimes reluctant to spend money on carousels,” says Fred Cirino, sales manager at Webb-Triax. “But they are easily justified with more accurate orders, better customer service and faster picking/ putaway.” In addition, the efficiency that carousels bring boosts profit. “With inflation held in check, the only way companies drive profit is to lessen cost for raw material or increase worker productivity with material handling,” says Larry Strayhorn, president at Diamond Phoenix Corporation. “Every percentage gain in worker productivity drops directly to the bottom line.” Among the industries benefiting from carousels are electronics/computing and office products. A recent Warehousing Education and Research Council study of 258 firms found that 31.4% of electronics/computer companies and 29% of industrial office products companies utilize carousels—33% more than in any other industry. The study also reported that one-fourth of large companies use this equipment, compared to only 10.9% of medium-sized firms and 7.3% of small companies.

The benefits of using carousels include greater organization in less space and less misplacement of parts. These advantages have come in handy in the aerospace/military industry. “We recently installed carousels and vertical lift modules to consolidate spare parts for aircraft maintenance at a Midwest Air Force base,” says Jeff Peters, product manager at Hanel Storage Systems. “Space savings was important at the base warehouse, as well as solving lost-part problems and mispicks.” Carousels are also helping retail. Clothing retailers, for example, often haphazardly pack their back rooms with out-of-season inventory. Carousels bring organization and access. “We can take 115 linear feet of apparel bar and put it into a carousel for garment protection and access,” says John C. Fink III, marketing director at J&D Associates. “The carriers are adjustable for garment height and with shelves, so you can pack even more children’s clothes or shoes into a unit.”

Carousels also bring flexibility, allowing companies to adjust to seasonal changes and even to the variances of individual store orders. “We are pioneering a virtual carousel workstation,” says Strayhorn from Diamond Phoenix. “Typically a worker picks from pods of two or three carousels. With the virtual workstation, if order volumes are low, software and controls are reconfigured so one worker picks from six, eight or 12 carousels.” Conversely, in seasonal times or with bigger orders, controls can be adjusted for smaller pods so there is only one worker per carousel. The versatility of carousels also allows a distribution center to assemble customized palletloads for the stores it supplies. For example, in Gallman, Mississippi, the Discount Auto Parts distribution center employs a two-level pallet carousel with a gantry robot that takes layers of different SKUs from the carousel to the takeaway conveyor to build orders. “Before this, a store had to order an entire palletload of one SKU, but this carousel innovation now lets stores keep less inventory and more variety of SKUs on hand,” says Dave Simon, product manager of horizontal and vertical carousels at White Systems.

Companies that employ carousels have reported dramatic jumps in productivity. For example, Les Schwab, the fourth largest independent tire and auto parts company in the country, installed a combined carousel and conveyor handling system in its Prineville, OR warehouse and distribution center. As a result, pick rate per operator shot up from 100 lines/hour to 824 lines/hour. Carousels were also utilized by Industrial Scientific Corporation, Oakdale, PA, which makes portable gas detectors for mining as well as Space Shuttle missions. Instead of using mobile carts to supply production lines with parts, they turned to carousels, each of which occupied only 67 square feet but could contain the same volume as mobile carts taking up 200 to 300 square feet of production space. Furthermore, setups that previously took up to four hours are now completed within 20 minutes.

While current applications for carousels abound, their future points to even wider adoption. Presently, distribution centers can use them to cross-dock, assembly lines can employ them in sequencing work-in-process, and receiving docks can utilize them to quarantine goods until further inspection. Vendors and consultants expect to augment this list. They foresee its adoption in flexible manufacturing operations in electronics and tool and die industries. They anticipate its utility in applications that require handling multiple-size cases in random order. Expected booming markets include electronics, cosmetics, health and beauty, prescription drugs, and medical device manufacturing. Current carousel innovations certainly support these expectations of robust sales. They are not only designed to move more smoothly and precisely, but their workstations are user-friendly as well.

Source: Choose Carousels – For All the Right Reasons
Christopher Trunk, Managing Editor
Material Handling Management, June 2002
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