Horizontal carousels have recently come into the limelight in the industrial storage sector because of their high efficiency in storing and retrieval of stored items. They are used worldwide, and find use in all kinds of warehouses and garages, from small to large.
But how do they work, and what makes them more efficient than legacy storage options?
The main component of a horizontal carousel is the central rotating apparatus that is the key to quickly accessing the desired item in storage. They are usually arranged in an oval fashion, although ‘rectangular’ would be a more apt description. This unit is usually controlled by a computer, usually known as pick light system, which takes user input and makes the carousel work and retrieves the exact item as needed by the user.
Attached to the central unit are shelves or containers. They are of different shapes and sizes and can be customized by the manufacturers as per the needs of the buyers. They are uniformly designed and are arranged in a straightforward fashion for easy and quick retrieval. The height of these containers is usually adjustable. If the operator needs to retrieve more than one item in a particular order, this can be fed into the computer software and it will bring up the appropriate containers in the appropriate sequence, saving considerable time and effort. This is often called as batch picking.
Sometimes, bigger workshops and warehouses use more than one horizontal carousels connected to each other in a pre-defined style. This is done to reduce the time needed for retrieval and cut down on more effort while getting multiple tasks done at the same time. These arrangements are sometimes known as pods.
Horizontal carousels are slowly replacing legacy storage units everywhere, and for the following reasons:
- Their compact designs save more floor space than ever, giving operators and staff more room to work with.
- Automated arranging systems cut down time loss in productivity by a huge margin
- Computerized pick light system improves the accuracy of item retrieval to up to 99.9%
- These systems are perfectly suited for batch picking, one of the most commonly practiced aspects of most workshops, factories and warehouses around the world.
