“A sheet metal storage rack like this allows you to store a huge amount of material in a small area”, Willem continues. “Our rack with 48 drawers possibly takes up 10 to 12 square metres. Previously, everything was on wooden pallets on racking that covered around 60 square metres. And with racking like that you also have to keep a path clear so you can move the forklift up to it. So you’re possibly talking about as much as 100 square metres of extra space. And it saves time too, as there is obviously a considerable reduction in forklift movements.”
“As far as I know aalbers|farina’s sheet metal storage rack is the most compact one available on the market. At the time we made our purchase it was certainly the only product offered by a renowned brand that worked in this way – with drawers. So we actually didn’t consider any other brand.”
super-efficient configuration
The sheet metal storage rack is now positioned between the two laser cutters. Willem confirms that this is a super-efficient configuration: “Using a sheet-handling unit that we developed ourselves, a kind of crane, we can take sheets from the rack and place them on one laser cutter or the other.”
“Our company is good at responding quickly to customer demands”, Willem concludes. “Flexibility is therefore extremely important for us. On average, our new laser cutter is in use for 10 hours a day and the old one for 50 per cent of the time. That means we can be highly flexible. If a customer needs something, we can respond right away. The sheet metal storage rack also fits in with this approach. We want to respond flexibly to the customer’s needs and the combination of machines that we now have at our disposal allows us to do just that.”