Conveyors and Sorters: Support growth and change

Until the new millennium, the industry had grown accustomed to getting 10 to 30 years of performance from automated equipment. But now, “set it and forget it” is a thing of the past. How should users and providers of conveyors and sorters best respond to conditions that seem to change monthly?

“What’s new in conveyance and materials handling is about what’s new in the consumer world, then you work back from there,” says Brian Reinhart, director of sales for Bastian Solutions, who says traditional equipment set up for bigger boxes is now expected to handle smaller boxes and polybags. “The evolution centers on the shift from large, industrial conveyance and sortation to more finesse-based solutions. The ‘big SUV’ is still out there, but a ‘Prius’ can efficiently handle little items without throwing them all over the place.”

Ivan Soltero, the global strategic marketing director for Rexnord, a 125-year-old company that has recently accelerated efforts to develop Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) capabilities, says Rexnord has conducted market research indicating the parcel/e-commerce/warehousing conveying industry will grow at a CAGR of 15%.

“What we’ve seen in the last five years is exponential growth triggered mainly by e-commerce and changing consumption behavior,” Soltero says. “IIoT provides the ability to know how equipment is performing, in real time, accessible on any mobile device around the world. It’s extremely powerful to make smarter decisions about equipment management, maintenance and replacement.”

Trade of the tools

Soltero suggests end users can be broadly split into two groups. In the first segment are those with enough resources to make the immediate jump into vertical warehousing, robotics, fully automated warehousing, etc. The second segment is approaching their digital upgrade in phases, testing different technologies to uncover those that best fit their business.

It is not uncommon for customers to upgrade their 20-year-old roller and flat-belt conveyor lines, for example, to provide additional performance data. Rexnord offers a digital productivity platform that allows customers to analyze data, optimize productivity and coordinate remote services and condition monitoring as an alternative to automation that’s out of reach for some customers. Remote support helps customers identify and monitor equipment to better plan for downtime and preventive maintenance. It’s a relatively basic example of IIoT at work, but it can make a big difference to companies across the sophistication spectrum.

Mitch Smith, vice president of business development for Hytrol, says IIoT and Industry 4.0 trends are prompting heightened focus on the installation and support aspects of system design.

“There’s a lot of work being done there to provide more connectivity between the various disciplines of designing, engineering, installing and implementing,” Smith says. “From a conveyor-only perspective, we’re trying to make them not only as intelligent as possible, but as easy to install, turn on and implement as possible.”

For example, the same frame might be used for high-voltage units, low-voltage units, rollers, belts or a mix as needed. But, it’s handling that mix that keeps managers up at night. Customers want to take equipment apart and move it around, Smith says. They’re asking for conveyors they can change on the fly, and many find 24-volt and “airless” conveyor solutions offer the modularity and flexibility they need. These solutions have been on the market for at least 20 years, but Smith notes an uptick in customers replacing current conveyors or upgrading power transmission in favor of low-voltage units.

Over the past three years, Hytrol’s 24-volt solutions have grown more than 20% per year, Smith says. Even with one of the broadest model selections in the industry, 24-volt solutions compose 25% of sales.

Real-time monitoring supports preventative maintenance and can help ensure optimal productivity.

Embedded “smarts” enhance the appeal of these technologies. Sensors and cameras may come and go, but Smith emphasizes the trend toward microprocessors built into conveyors, which can gather info and periodically send it back through the programmable logic controller (PLC) or the Cloud to maintenance software or to the conveyor supplier.

“When it’s tied into the maintenance software, you’re now getting diagnostic info about how equipment is running and performing,” Smith says. “Now you can better define both preventative and critical maintenance responses.”

Microprocessors have so many features and capabilities that hiring a controls engineer to do the logic is no longer necessary, Smith says, because it’s already built in. With a little bit of training, a mechanical engineer or maintenance person can install conveyor equipment.

Crawl, walk, run

For all the shiny new toys, a huge amount of traditional conveyor and sortation is still out there. Tilt-tray and bomb bay sorters remain popular, and Reinhart says the market for each has broadened. High-speed systems for small items used to be primarily for big parcel carriers, he says, and now any startup with the volume might consider them. With an eye toward supporting growth for old and new equipment alike, conveyor manufacturers are keen to design expandability into products.

“Traditionally it was durability, cost, ease of use, but now expandability is a big part of these systems,” Reinhart adds. “It is extremely important to customers to know they can add induction points, carriers and chutes when the time comes.”

Reinhart advises starting with the basics, monitoring performance metrics like reads, diverts and run time for timely, automated maintenance scheduling. It helps to have redundancies like ongoing support in addition to regular equipment maintenance. Leveraging remote and on-site support provides meaningful risk mitigation, Reinhart says.

“Some folks say they run a pretty tight ship, but they have no remote support. They say Bob can fix anything. Well, what happens when he is sick or retires?” Reinhart asks. “Some operations run great—until they don’t, and then all hell breaks loose.”

Many have not accounted for the 2 a.m. emergency phone call, and Reinhart says plenty of operations that would benefit from 24/7 support don’t have it. It’s important to know where resources are limited, Reinhart adds. What happens if a sort lane clogs? Or if the database fails? If you’re installing new controls, did you use a test environment before you sent it to the floor?

“With a formal support plan, you don’t need Bob, or at least you have a backup,” Reinhart says. “Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Too many don’t even know what the worst is, so they don’t plan for it until it comes.”

Detailed visibility

Eric Rice, principal product manager at Honeywell Intelligrated, highlights an overriding push to collect data to make materials handling equipment maintenance and operation more predictive. Customers should be asking themselves: Am I getting what I expect out of this equipment investment? How am I measuring that? Am I comparing metrics consistently from one DC to the next? Some compare different facilities in their network at the throughput level and decide that if they look the same they must be operating at the same level of quality or productivity. Peel back a layer and you might find more labor in one, Rice suggests, but why?

“They just don’t have visibility into labor issues. A lot of folks are looking at summary reports, high-level data rolled up daily or weekly. What they don’t see are all of the micro-transactions happening throughout the day that are hurting those numbers,” Rice says. “Labor bottlenecks, repetitive faults and degrading equipment go unnoticed.”

Rice offers the example of a sorter stopped for a total of 30 minutes in a day. The only person concerned about it, he says, was the person clearing the jams. Another customer expressed pride in its practice of operators recording by hand if the system is down for more than five minutes. “How accurate is that tally likely to be?” Rice asks. “What downtime do they truly have, and what repetitive issues are contributing?”

Rice says many operations can start with the wealth of untapped data in the control system. Add some sensors for motor health, vibration and temperature, pull all the data together and powerful insights will emerge. Those insights can identify root causes for things like repetitive jams, bad read rates, tracking and gapping issues.

“Some of these issues are not noticed until there’s a double-digit percentage of things that aren’t diverting anymore,” Rice says. “Until it really starts to impact how full the circulation lane is, they might not even notice, much less be concerned. Nip those issues in the bud instead of tolerating 10% errors for weeks when you could have stopped it as soon as you saw the gap rate ticking up.”

Power monitoring is also becoming mainstream. Tracking amp draws inside the control panel is a great leading indicator for when things start to go wrong, Rice says. Even when equipment ages and becomes inefficient, it is often possible to rebuild and make significant improvements, which can save tens of thousands of dollars in electricity alone.

“From our perspective, before jumping to digitize and automate, audit your existing business. Take time to analyze who you are, where you are, where the competition is and who your suppliers are, and then you can make sure your first step is in right direction,” Soltero says. “Then select those pieces where a gradual step into these new technologies can allow you to test and measure compatibility with your existing and future operations.”

In a recent visit to a U.S. drop-shipping facility, Soltero and the facility manager inspected a 20-year-old roller conveying system. Soltero asked about package output per hour, per minute, conveyor speeds, coefficient of friction of typical packages against the rollers, package damage rates, downtime averages, weekly maintenance costs, etc.

“The answer was: ‘We truly don’t know. We don’t track that,’” Soltero recalls. “There is a huge opportunity to bring hundreds of DCs and warehousing facilities into the new digitized world of knowing what works and what doesn’t in real time, so they can identify weaknesses in their conveying systems, prevent failure and schedule maintenance proactively rather than after a disaster happens.”