An "Outside the Box" Solution Helps Increase Productivity for Electrical Enclosure Manufacture
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 | | • Two person job is now one person job |
| • 5 to 6% increase in productivity since installation |
| • Freed up work area |
|
A Midwestern manufacturer of electrical enclosures splits its time building both standard
stock and high end custom enclosures for their customers, so they know what it’s like to
go out of their way to create a unique solution for customer satisfaction. At the main
fabrication site, their off the shelf material handling solution wasn’t working for them.
Problems
- The Jib Crane they were using was right in the middle of their work space
- Couldn't rotate the steel doors the 360 degrees needed because the post of the
jib was in the way
- The tooling could not rotate the doors horizontally so two workers had to
manually lift and rotate the doors for the tool to connect to it
"It was a jib system that gave us 12 feet of coverage, but we couldn’t rotate 360-degrees
and the post of the jib was right in the middle of the work area taking up space. The end
effector wouldn’t allow us to pick up the doors from a horizontal position, so we would
end up having two guys pick up the door and rotate it just so we could then pick it up with
the lifting device."
Solution
The solution is comprised of a freestanding monorail system that is 23 feet long and
features two parallel runways supporting a platform-mounted articulating jib crane with
360-degree rotation and 7-foot reach. At the end of the jib is a torque arm with a Gorbel
G-Force ® Q with 660 pound capacity and a vacuum end tool that allows for a 90-degree
tilt and 360-degree rotation.
Results
"We’re very happy with the Gorbel system,” said the Operations Manager. “Over the
course of two shifts, this lifting happens probably 150 times. Streamlining it has been
great. We’ve been able to take the second person off of this job and move them to another job in the factory. Even with one less person, we’ve seen about a 5 or 6 percent
increase in productivity in the 8 months we’ve been using the Gorbel products"
is a proud member of the EASE Ergonomic Assist Systems & Equipment Council
of Material Handling Industry of America
600 Fishers Run Fishers, NY 14453-0596 Phone: 800/821-0086 Fax: 800/828-1808
Email: info@gorbel.com Website: www.gorbel.com
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