Innovative pallet warehouse saves time, energy & space

Bridge between OT and IT

Matthys set to work with a project team made up of nine specialist employees. “The groundwork was quickly laid. We started from a stacker crane that moves horizontally over a rail and vertically with a lift. There are also two forks that extend to move the pallets. We are used to a few more moves, so that wasn’t difficult,” Christophe says with a smile.

However, there was also much that was new. “We didn't have 90% of the parts in stock as standard. Fortunately, we were able to rely on Siemens delivery times of just 2-3 weeks. A SIMATIC 1514SP-CPU controls the whole thing, while SINAMICS G120 drives provide the propulsion. As the drives exchange energy on a shared DC circuit, we can use horizontal braking energy for vertical acceleration, and vice versa. This results in great energy savings.”

“The biggest challenge for us was the IT. Our pallet warehouse chooses the optimal location for itself. To do this, the first one performs a 3D scan of the pallet to find out its volume. We have also built an ERP module that we can link to existing ERP packages. This allows both us and our customers to work with any ERP package. We work with an SQL database for this purpose.”

“We helped with the database,” says Arnoud Maes, technical account manager at Siemens. “As a PLC programmer, Matthys is particularly familiar with OPC UA, but a protocol like MQTT is much more suitable for connection to an IT database. We helped establish this stable and secure connection with existing software blocks.”

“For us, this was a learning process at the intersection of IT and OT,” Christophe confirms. “Our engineers and our IT specialists came closer together and that is definitely a win. The visualisation they built together in WinCC Unified looks incredible. This bodes well for our future machines.”

More meaningful work for everyone

Matthys’ employees are unanimously enthusiastic about the pallet warehouse. “Our machine builders no longer lose time searching, our warehouse workers are not constantly distracted from the job they are doing and our IT specialists managed to overcome a tricky challenge. This was a very meaningful project for everyone – including our account managers, who can now sell a totally new machine to a new target group.”

“We are already convinced. The automated pallet warehouse is faster and safer than storing everything manually. It also saves a lot of space: our storage area has reduced from 833 m² to 220 m². What’s more, we have a much better overview of our stock thanks to the link with the ERP package. Everything also just looks much more orderly and organised. And we are flexible. Here, we provided 600 pallet spaces at 32 metres and two entrances and exits via roller conveyors, but it could be smaller or larger, of course. We remain a customised machine builder.”

Christophe is confident that the pallet warehouse will be a success. However, this project also represented a breakthrough for Matthys on other levels. “We learned a lot about data communication and software integration that we can now apply in other projects. In fact, this is the first step towards a fully integrated logistics process. We have machines that cut, roll, stack and so on and we now have a fully automated warehouse. If we are also able to automate the step in between – and that is the intention, we are already looking towards autonomous mobile robots – then we will have come full circle.”