Dry Tower Project at Zollner

With 18 SMD lines and a storage area of over 3700m², German electronics manufacturer Smyczek keeps 180,000 component reels on site. Following huge growth over the past few years, the material logistics in their SMD production facility has been automated, step by step. In the latest project, all opened reels and the most frequently required full reels are stored in the Dry Tower, which means that about 80% of the materials required for production are handled by the automated Dry Tower system. After unloading, the reels are simply stacked on a trolley and fed into the Dry Tower. The logging and storage process is fully automated from this point. For the retrieval of the reels Totech has developed a completely new and unique solution: The reels are stacked in an upright container. This ensures that when a batch is retrieved, each reel is easily accessed by the operator. This prototype is currently still unique but should be ready for series production in the near future

Before the introduction of Dry Tower, 13,000 reels were distributed and stored on 5 paternoster racks. These then had to be manually retrieved, sorted and brought to the set-up point. At the end of production, all reels had to be sorted first by paternoster and then by moisture level. The moisture-sensitive parts had to be sealed in vacuum packaging. About 4000 storage and retrieval steps were needed every day. After moving into a larger production hall in Reute, Germany, Dry Tower was used to simplify the processes considerably and to reduce the error rate. Today, the reels are placed in and retrieved automatically. They are labelled with their respective feeder table designation, moved to the set-up stations and can be added to the line. The part used reels are returned to the containers. This is transferred semi-automatically to a driverless transport system, which fully automatically takes it back to the storage system. Approximately 90% of all reels required in SMD production are stored in the Dry Tower and retrieved and placed back into storage without any waiting time. Since the Dry Tower was installed, the storage and retrieval processes have been drastically reduced and search and waiting times minimised. The high level of expansion that Sick has experienced could thus be handled without the need for additional personnel and employees can now devote more time to value-adding activities.